Victoria Beckham Beauty originally chose Amex when there were ten people at the company, primarily for its points and benefits. However, there was no consideration for expense reporting or international corporate card provisioning, because these needs were not critical at the time.

As the company entered hyper-growth, Charity joined as an HR team of one, and Hayong joined as a controller to support the CFO and an outsourced accounting team. With Amex and SAP Concur as their expense management solutions, there was no scalable way to manage reimbursements, streamline approval flows, or quickly provision international credit cards. Plus, critical support requests, like a credit limit increase, would not receive a response for weeks or months.

Victoria Beckham Beauty wanted to empower its small but mighty HR and finance teams with a scalable spend management system that could solve all of these challenges.

Charity and Hayong were searching for the cornerstone of their new spend management process that would eventually support them as they prepared to double their monthly spend.

For HR, Charity said the team’s “biggest priorities were to create enough stability to support how quickly we were growing while we continued to expand across all kinds of different regions and countries.” Hayong described the finance team’s objectives as “building a foundation of systems,” which included ERP, policies, and expense reports.

Ultimately, Victoria Beckham Beauty chose Rippling Spend.

Victoria Beckham Beauty was preparing to drastically increase ad spend to drive revenue growth when Hayong needed a credit limit increase from Amex. Hayong said his inquiry was left open for months and that it would often take “days, weeks, and months,” to hear back.

Rippling swiftly fulfilled Hayong’s request for a higher credit limit and has since responded to support requests “within a few hours.” Hayong continued saying, “You guys are always available and very fast at serving the customer.”

Had the company stayed on Amex, Charity would have needed to find a separate solution solely for issuing international corporate cards. Victoria Beckham Beauty’s overextended team could not afford to allocate more time toward managing a new solution, especially if it took time away from key initiatives like strategic planning.

Rippling Spend’s ability to seamlessly allow multiple admins to issue new corporate cards in different countries enabled Charity to manage her global team with speed.

“I love this spend program. If one of my international team members is traveling and their card gets stolen, which has happened, I can just issue them a new virtual card immediately. That is a rare thing to be able to get and is super beneficial,” said Charity.

Visibility and compliance were key priorities for Victoria Beckham Beauty. However, disparate systems and poor interface design left the team with no visibility into individual spending behavior and a cumbersome approvals process.

Now, with Rippling’s user-friendly interface and streamlined reporting, it takes Hayong just 15 minutes to analyze the entire company’s spend from the Rippling dashboard. “The dashboard is straightforward. It looks like Apple instead of Microsoft. No extra instruction manuals required,” said Hayong.

The team also granted visibility into corporate card spend to all relevant admins, making compliance and approvals that much easier. “Things are very obvious—I love that in a system. I don’t have to be running around searching for approvals.” Charity noted. “For a team of our size that is as fast-moving as we need to be, I think having that visibility and easy implementation for Rippling Spend was the biggest value. Compared to other programs I’ve used, it checks all the boxes.”

For a team of our size that is as fast-moving as we need to be, I think having that visibility and easy implementation for Rippling Spend was the biggest value. Compared to other programs I’ve used, it checks all the boxes.

Charity Mastrangelo

Head of HR at Victoria Beckham Beauty

• Attentive support in 1 to 2 hours instead of weeks. Hayong and Charity were no longer blocked by slow customer support.
• 2x increase in spend. Rippling matched the pace of Victoria Beckham Beauty’s growth by quickly extending their credit line.
• 15 minutes to review company-wide spend. From one dashboard, Hayong had the visibility to feel in control of compliance and out-of-policy spend.