From Posh Spice to Fashion Business Entrepreneur

Building your personal branding can be challenging but it is also gratifying. An interesting way to keep motivated to work hard on it, it is investigating cases about iconic individuals who built their powerful brands.

 

Today’s post is about Victoria Beckham, who used to build her personal branding from pop artist to fashion designer. Facing advantages and disadvantages as a celebrity and entrepreneur at the same time, Beckham says that “the most valuable part of being famous is that you have a voice and people will listen. I mean I can get a lot of attention. I don’t have to rely on advertising campaigns.” She also emphasise the importance to be focused, to work hard and, even, to control media exposition.

 

I divided this post with 4 main lessons that we can learn with the “posh entrepreneur”, check it out:

 

1 – The Mission Statement

During the time that Victoria Beckham was a spice girl, she started to craft her own brand with the following sentence “I want to be as famous as Persil Automatic”, revealing that she would like to be more than a pop star, well-known around the world, her ambition was to be disruptive and be part of people daily lives.

In the book “It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be”, written by Paul Arden, this mission statement illustrates the importance to clarify “where do you want to go” from the beginning. In other words, Victoria Beckham transformed her “goal in reality” because she was conscious about the level of fame she wanted to achieve and the brand experience she wanted to deliver.

According to Paul Arden, “as a teenager, Victoria Beckham’s ambition was not just to be better than her mates or even be a famous singer, but to become a world brand. She not only dreamed about it, but wanted it enough to go about getting it. That in itself makes her different from most of us. It’s not how good she was that mattered, it’s how good she wanted to be.”

 

2 – The Process of Learning

It is also important to remember that Beckham became a great designer because she made the effort to learn about fashion, branding and business with leader’s eyes. Firstly, she trained her fashion business look through a series of licensing arrangements. As she wanted to be a designer, she lived intensively the opportunities to work with renowned professionals, in her words: “I learnt an enormous amount about how I like things to be done and maybe how I would do things differently, myself. It was an incredible experience.”

Along the time, Beckham realised that she wanted more than celebrity endorsements, then, her ambitious leaded to work with creative process to become a business leader. However, such ambition also had a balance with the sense that she needed to impress as a designer from beginning. About her first presentation, she says that “I wasn’t nervous because I was a famous person, but nervous as any young designer would be when building a collection”.

 

3 – Partners and Team: Choice it right!

Like a successful business woman, Victoria Beckham is proud to say that has choose the right partners and created a culture and vision in which people want to join and work for. She started with a very small team in the head office and invited a key member to start the team – Simon Fuller, who Beckham first met as a music businessman, at the age of eighteen.

Victoria Beckham has a lot of admirers because she doesn’t need to work but she is known to work hard since she was a little girl. Besides that, she doesn’t await the “phone to ring”, in her words: “I will pick up the phone and I will badger people and make them crazy and I will make it happen myself”.

 

4 – How to deal with criticism

During her journey, Beckham had to deal with a lot of preconceptions, since the clothes that she wore when she was a spice girl to the fact that a celebrity couldn’t have her own line. In response, she showed the media her ability to transform her image from posh spice to fashion business entrepreneur, and it was not only a case of appearance adaptation…

As a spice girl, some people tried to argue that a female pop group never could be part of a magazine cover because it would not sell. The overcoming of this kind of preconception made her an example of strong and determined woman who do not take things personally with criticism and thinks “I will get it right”. When somebody says that something is not possible to achieve, Beckham answers: “Why? Let’s find a different way to do it and let’s do it.” Now, that’s exciting!”

 

With an impressive 91% of increase in relation to last year, and £30 million in sales, the Victoria Beckham is a respectable fashion business. However, perhaps, the most important legacy of brand is her personal branding. Her constant apparitions in covers of renowned magazines around the world, as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Allure indicates that the fashion business entrepreneur still have a lot to tell and show to the world.