Trending Now: Grace Beverley on the reality of being a celebrity CEO: ‘It’s business whack-a-mole’ – Fans React

If you’ve been in a gym, near a coffee shop or on a hot girl walk in the past seven years – or perhaps you’re one of her combined 2.2m followers – the chances are you already know about Beverley’s story. A vlogger-turned-entrepreneur, she’s the founder of a business empire reported to be worth £70m, which spans three central strands. There’s Tala, an athleisure brand that makes activewear from recycled or upcycled materials and often sells out of its regular launches of flared leggings, coats and matching pyjama sets. Then there’s Shreddy, a workout app and supplement brand, where you’ll find programmes such as Busy Girl Challenge and Signature Sculpt, as well as four powdered supplements (Supersnooze, Superwoman, Supergreens and Superglow) that feel like a promise in a glass: drink these and everything will be okay.

Most recently, she started The Productivity Method, daily and digital planners that seem to whisper that their blank pages of time-blocking logs and daily trackers for sleep, steps and water intake will unlock a new, glossier version of you. The planners proved to be so aspirational that they had a 75,000-person waiting list when they launched.

On her podcast (formerly named Working Hard, Hardly Working, after her bestselling book), Beverley interviews industry leaders and celebrities about their journeys to success, including the likes of Jo Malone CBE and Sabrina Dhowre Elba. She releases one hour-long episode each week, as well as dropping ‘bonus episodes’, often a monologue about a trending topic or answering listener dilemmas around friendship or career advice. Oh, and did we mention Retrograde, the talent agency she co-founded in 2024, as well as her investments in Wild, the natural deodorant brand, and Huel, alongside her traditional influencer sponsorship deals and ongoing partnerships?

Beverley’s journey into business started age 19 (by 23, she’d appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list) and has never really stopped. With a £366 Loewe candle on the desk, and marble, wood and cast-iron furniture surrounding her and her team, sitting in on this planning meeting has the surreal feeling of stepping straight into a vision board. But what does it actually take to get here? We think we want to manifest this life… but do we really? I immersed myself in Beverley’s world to find out.

Founder life

The puffer jacket is not quite right. Tala’s head of design and Beverley are sat in a glass-fronted meeting room discussing an upcoming collection and the various iterations they want to make to the piece of outerwear. It is ‘too long’ and too, well… puffy, right now.

They know this because the team – of which 89% are women – wear-test the samples before they go into production, feeding back on how the clothing fits into an actual life. Beverley also receives and approves a sample of every individual piece of clothing – later explaining she originally had oversight on even the smallest of business decisions. ‘Before the end of 2024, I was still approving every single campaign, every shoot location, every influencer we worked with,’ she says, when we catch up later. ‘It felt like I was doing the right thing, but in reality, it was just bad for the business, because it became a bottleneck.’

Beverley’s central London office – split across two floors – is unassuming from the outside. But it’s quite the empire, and it’s all built off the back of an Instagram account set up when she was in sixth form, to track her fitness progress. That account grew and grew, until it hit 1m followers, and in 2016, Shreddy came into being (which involved selling batches of resistance bands alongside gym plans and healthy recipe PDFs), followed by Tala, when she was 22.

One of four sisters and the daughter of a business consultant and art curator, Beverley began vlogging three times a week while at the University of Oxford, when she spotted a gap in the market for sustainable and comfortable, while also stylish, gym wear. Originally launched with a licensing partner, Tala had more than 50,000 orders and £6m in sales in its first year, selling a range of products, including £6 socks and sports bras. And this was all before Beverley had even graduated from one of the UK’s most prestigious universities with a 2:1 in music.

Since then, the brand expansion has been rapid, securing millions of pounds in investment and employing 88 people in the process (with her other employees focusing on Shreddy and The Productivity Method). Recent account data shows Tala sold £19.8m of product in the last tax year, a rise of 18% year-on-year. But Beverley is also candid about the business lows. She previously shared a story of having to sell her Tesla to make payroll during the pandemic, while she recently had to call off expansion plans in America – for which she had already moved to LA for three months – when Donald Trump announced changes to tariffs overnight. ‘That was something we’d spent years on as our number one priority – I’d literally moved country and done all of this work and spent all of this money… We couldn’t have foreseen that.’

Tala now has two brick and mortar shops in London, with the second opening in Westfield, White City, last November (‘crazy week chasing our dreams!’ Beverley wrote on Instagram at the time). Shreddy, meanwhile, has more than 1m community members, while The Productivity Method was up 50% year-on-year in January, after leaning into the traditional ‘new year, new you’ rhetoric. It is a busy picture, sure, and one that, to the outside at least, illustrates success. But what is it like on the inside?

Behind the scenes

Running across the oak wood floor, Beverley’s dog is misbehaving. The maltipoo is meant to be out for an early morning walk, but instead, is darting in front of the marble island. ‘Zeus, come on,’ her husband, Amar Daved, calls, appearing in the kitchen in grey joggers and a navy sweatshirt – the archetypical fit man outfit. He is unfazed by the commotion of a photographer, glam team and, well, me, in his home, with their second maltipoo, Ziggy, already on his lead.

The pair met on the invite-only celebrity dating app Raya in the summer of 2022, initially doing long distance from London to New York, before photographer Daved proposed in the South of France just over a year later. We’re in their zone two London home (which was recently sold for £2.7m) and I’m about to jump on the Tube with Beverley, to her office, where she works three days a week.

Daved is familiar to me, as he will be to millions of others, because while only 70 guests attended their wedding at a French château, the rest of us watched on via TikTok, greedily consuming the three-day wedding extravaganza. There was the 10-minute clip of Beverley’s vows, which has since amassed 9m views, followed up by a video of them cutting their cake (11m views), a detailed insight into how Beverley chose her wedding dress (500k views) and a ‘spend my wedding morning with me’ vlog (600k views.)

It’s a well-trodden path for those who choose to share the most intimate moments of their life with their audiences – and it isn’t something Beverley overthought too much. ‘It felt pretty natural. It wasn’t “Should we do this? Are we going to share that?” It was fun. My personal team were coming anyway, so it was more like, “Great! What [content] are we going to get?” Most of my friends, whether they’re online or not, have posted [their weddings] online.’

But, while we may feel like we have seen everything possible from their special day (after all, seeing someone’s vows is pretty personal), the reality is that what we see is intentionally chosen and part of a bigger plan. ‘I share what I want to share of my personal life and what feels right in the moment, but I also keep a lot private.’

Beverley’s intentions are something she references a lot: everything she does is deliberate and thought through – ‘I’d love to be happy-go-lucky, but I’m not’ – right down to her social calendar. She schedules in time with her friends most Monday evenings, and the Sunday before our interview, she hosted a vision-boarding night for her closest girls.

Like most of us, she has an annual leave allowance from her businesses – 25 days a year – and worked across much of the Christmas break when urgent things came up (or ‘business whack-a-mole’, as she calls it).

‘I’m pretty good at taking my weekends off,’ she says, but later, she corrects this to: ‘I get at least one day of the weekend. It’s part of owning a business that sometimes urgent things come up and you deal with them on a Saturday. But at the same time, it’s about how you manage your time and set your boundaries – and then realising your business isn’t always going to obey those boundaries. My version of balance is being able to work to make my dream happen. And because of that, I’m able to do certain other things that do make me feel refreshed.’

Perhaps she is talking about her beautiful honeymoon to Bora Bora or spending her 27th birthday in Cape Town. Or maybe it is the little luxuries, such as ordering an Uber home after a late night in the office or having a food delivery service for every meal. Beverley and I live in a similar neighbourhood – it took me 20 minutes to walk to her double-fronted house – but it is fair to say that our weekends look quite different. While I might not have indoor security cameras, a grand piano or any, er, stairs, I wonder how I would feel to frequently be working six-day weeks, living a life where work often has to come first. It’s not exactly working in A&E, but still, the grind must get to her.

‘You shouldn’t be working yourself to the bone and you can’t pour from an empty cup – I strongly believe those things to be true,’ she says now. ‘But at the same time, it would be false of me to sit here and say you can have a business and have a great work/life balance. Most of the time, that balance doesn’t look how you thought it would. Otherwise, everyone would have a business! That’s just the reality.’

Influencer vs CEO

While making arrangements to write this feature, Cosmopolitan was offered unfiltered access to Beverley’s world, peeking behind the curtain to uncover whether the person we see online matches who she actually is. Watching her in front of the camera, jokingly jumping on to all fours on her kitchen counter for our photographer (‘like this?’) or offering me a crisp so that I can confirm it tastes like an Oxo cube, Beverley is very similar to the content I’ve consumed, via my iPhone screen, over the course of the past 10 years.

But, of course, the unspoken part of all of this is that I’m a journalist writing a profile. And I’m doing so in a world that demands our public figures to be aspirational – but not too aspirational. Something to aim for – but also relatable and authentic; the girl-next-door-but-with-a-very-nice-life. From spending time with her, I’d say she is authentic… but there are many parts of her life that are not relatable at all. When she does share the more intimate parts of her life (her polycystic ovary syndrome journey and her husband almost dying from sepsis, to name two examples), what side of her is choosing to share that: the brand founder… or the influencer?

‘Me posting online is part of my business and it’s also part of me. But anyone can have boundaries, even if they make money online. I’m an open book – I want to post about the weird and silly things that happen in my life, and I think that’s natural. But as authentic as social media might be, if I’m dealing with massive problems in the business, I’m probably not posting on my Stories that day.’ For Beverley, her priorities are clear. ‘I have a duty to my job, first and foremost, to my team, my investors and my shareholders. I might want to talk about an issue online, but what if [one of my team] saw that and thought, “Oh my god! Should I get a job elsewhere?” Just because it makes good content, it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.’

The dual nature of Beverley’s public persona isn’t something new – and in fact, it stretches right back to the early days of Shreddy and Tala, when she made the decision to archive her YouTube videos in 2021. Despite making hundreds of thousands of pounds a month from influencing, she pulled the plug, explaining now that it was the only way she knew she’d commit to her business properly. ‘The easier thing to do would’ve just been to keep uploading videos, but I didn’t want to be a full-time influencer. I said to myself: “Right, you’ve graduated. Now go and start the job you want to do, like everyone else.” I doubled down on wanting to build a business that worked. Who do I need to hire? What senior leadership team do I need in place? What logistics and operational teams? I made sure I wasn’t making too much content around Tala, so it wasn’t a content focus.’

Again, her intention was clear – and is seemingly working. Beverley says she once stood in a Tala store all day and was only recognised by one person, while the hope is that the crossover between her personal Instagram followers and the brand’s 600k is minimal. A scroll of Tala’s Instagram account doesn’t show any connection to Beverley at all (although the same cannot be said for Shreddy or The Productivity Method – something that is, no doubt, intentional). ‘One of the big things that comes up for me is, I’m doing things allthe time – my days are very full and I’m working across lots of businesses. There are different amounts of energy required to be in certain meetings or shooting content. I get to decide how much headspace things are taking up and maybe that’s when I don’t post on social media at all. I want to deal with my life right now, right here. I feel real gratitude to the audience that has been with me for a long time, but I don’t think anyone owes anyone their privacy.’

The secret to success

Spending the day with Beverley, it’s hard to come away without reconsidering my own relationship with ambition. We are the same age and started our careers – albeit me as an intern and her as a brand founder – at a similar time. I’m about to take an extended break from work for the first time in 11 years, having spent the whole of my 20s working for Cosmopolitan. And while I have loved and grown with it – or maybe because of that – it’s scary to step away, particularly during a time when what’s expected of women feels more muddled and conflicting than ever before. In the past decade we have flipped from the girl boss script to quiet quitting, and we’re having louder discussions as to how hustle culture is at odds with being able to nurture a healthy mind.

‘There definitely is an element of wearing this workaholic badge of honour and running around saying, “I’m so tired”, “I’m so exhausted”,’ Beverley agrees. ‘I got a bit bored of that from myself – I felt a bit like, “Let’s make sure you are living a life day-to-day where you are really excited about it and don’t feel the need to tell everyone that it has been shit.” It has been about finding the right balance – I’ve definitely got it wrong before. But also, I’m working on something for myself, so I’m aware it may well feel far less draining than for someone who’s working a nine-to-five that they really hate. I also have the privilege and luxury of things that mean if I have had a busy day, my evening can be easier.’

Is that what success looks like for Beverley? A smoother, more comfortable life? ‘I really do believe in the problem that Tala is solving,’ she says, a branded black vest poking out from her blazer at the opportune moment. ‘The customer deserves the product we’re creating – people should be asking more from their activewear, and we’re in an amazing position to provide it. I’m motivated by wanting that outcome.

‘For me, it’s about building a life that you don’t need a constant break from. It’s working with amazing people and feeling fulfilled every day.’ If I could life swap with Beverley, tomorrow, magically, would I? As much as I’d love her house (and some… stairs), the answer is no. But not because I think she’s miserable, far from it – she is someone who I can’t see doing anything else but this: building a business and working incredibly hard to get there. But when we idealise someone like her, it’s worth considering the reality. For one, not everyone will have the privilege of being a white, blonde, upper middle-class woman, with a private education and a financial safety net (something that Beverley acknowledges, frequently, throughout our time together). We need to make sure that when we idolise Beverley (and others like her), we’re not setting unfair expectations for ourselves and our achievements. But more importantly, it’s worth considering that this is not a life that is magically manifested, but one that is intentionally built and, whatever it may look like from the outside, not everyone would find enjoyment within. I don’t think I would. So when vision-boarding your life, don’t forget to step away from your screens and ask, what would genuinely fulfil you?

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Photography: Eva Pentel; Words: Dusty Baxter-Wright; Editor in Chief: Claire Hodgson; Art Director: Alex Hambis; Acting Entertainment Booker: Furvah Shah; Make up: Katie Daisy; Hair: Mark Hayhurst; Production: Beverley Croucher