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Few brands have an icon like Victoria Beckham at the helm. But Lauren Edelman knows a thing or two about working for a company with a storied founder: Edelman honed her experience at Chanel’s beauty division and at L’Oréal, working with brands like Ralph Lauren, before joining Victoria Beckham’s beauty brand in 2023.
“L’Oréal taught me how to run a business. And Chanel taught me how to maintain a brand,” said Edelman.
Edelman was named CEO of Victoria Beckham Beauty in January after two years as CMO. In her time at the brand, the VBB universe has expanded into fragrance, launched its first foundation in collaboration with Augustinus Bader and grown its retail footprint from three doors to, by the end of 2025, more than 200 outposts across the globe. Most recently, that includes an expansion to new markets like Australia, which Victoria Beckham Beauty entered via a launch at Mecca in October.
But even with VBB’s expanding footprint and product assortment, as CEO, Edelman has sought to maintain a tight balance between growth and that more elusive quality necessary to remaining a successful beauty line: desirability.
“I really wanted to reset us a little bit. Because in the end, desirability is the engine for awareness and for new customer growth. It’s really hard to buy desirability. You have to create it emotionally,” she said. “I focus the team on this balance, which is a really difficult three-legged stool between image, scale and relevance. And it’s not something you achieve. It’s kind of a forever objective.”
Also key to her tenure as CEO is maintaining excellent products — “If you build a beautiful brand and you get all these people to purchase, but they don’t love the product, it’s going to be really hard to maintain longevity,” she said — and building out her team. One of her first outside hires was bringing on Westman Atelier alum Samantha Wilson as vp of global brand and communications.
With reputable retail partners and figures like Wilson on board, Edelman has sought to bring VBB into an era where IRL experiences are as important as a strong digital presence. When Victoria Beckham expanded her namesake fashion brand into beauty in 2019, the ongoing success of DTC models almost made in-person consumer connections an afterthought. But today’s model has flipped, where getting products into the hands of just a handful of consumers can be more impactful than a social media campaign reaching tens of thousands of eyeballs.
“I believe so much in this balance between your online experience and your in-person experience. And we had done so much online, we almost needed to spin the pendulum in the other direction to create balance,” said Edelman. “With Sam coming on to the brand, one of the things that both of us were really passionate about was more in-person events for the press, for influencers, even for consumers. … My goal is to make sure more people touch the product, because the minute they touch the product, they’re excited.”
Celebrity-founded beauty brands were also still something of a novelty in 2019. By 2025, countless celebrity beauty brands have been launched to rapid fanfare — and some have quickly and quietly folded. But Beckham has built her beauty legitimacy at a slower — by today’s standards — pace.
“It has taken six years for us to get to a full face. We just added foundation,” Edelman said. “The team’s approach to this is pretty methodical. It’s not, ‘I’m chasing the market, I’m chasing a trend.’ It’s, ‘What’s right for the brand at this time?’ And it’s really, honestly, driven by Victoria’s point of view. Like, ‘What do I need in my makeup bag?’”
Not all celebrity founders have a founder with the pop-culture icon status of Beckham — Beckham, once a member of the Spice Girls, was the subject of a Netflix documentary series in 2025, a follow-up to husband David’s own documentary series on the platform in 2023. But for a brand to have any success beyond a household name, it has to live beyond even the diehard VB fans. “In the end, the brand stands on its own for all the kind of universe that [Victoria] has created around herself,” Edelman said.
It helps to have products that consumers want to buy again and again: Products like the Satin Kajal Liner were instrumental to helping the Victoria Beckham brand crack $150 million in sales in 2024. Naturally, that growth has sparked rumors of an exit for the brand, but Edelman declined to comment on such speculation.
Instead, now coming up on the anniversary of her promotion to the CEO role, Edelman put the focus back on her team.
“A CEO is only as good as the leaders that they have with them,” she said. “So I just feel so lucky that I’ve got this incredible team who are complete experts in their fields.”
