Everything that people were lucky to work with, and I can say, I wasn't allowed. I'm strategy. What's that imposter voice saying? It's going to be found out.
Good question, I suppose. Do you have any skrisies? Has that ever had an impact on you? I never believed my own height.
It's very easy once you see yourself in articles and winning awards and everything. I'm amazing. I didn't fit in particularly well and I've seen the extremities of mental health. Me and myself going to dark periods, but nothing would suffice.
Nothing would give you. If you haven't got a thick skin, you shouldn't be in this game. David Gounsey. At one point, he was one of the highest paid male models in the entire world, a beautiful, beautiful man.
And so hearing that and seeing how beautiful he is would understandably make you assume a lot of things about him. But what you're going to hear today is that those things are wrong and that you should never judge a book by its cover. How is it possible that someone that looks like David Gounsey can describe themselves as having imposter syndrome, being low in confidence and waiting to be found out? He's now become an entrepreneur.
He's focused on launching his brand new brand, David Gounsey, well-wear, and he's taking on a completely different industry. It's crazy. So with people's diaries, you never know what you'll find. And what I found in David's today was truly fascinating, unexpected, vulnerable, and extremely surprisingly relatable.
So without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is the Diabosseo. I hope nobody's listening. But if you are, then please keep this yourself. There's a lot of very beautiful people in the world, right?
But they don't manage to achieve what you've achieved across multiple disciplines, whether it's within your modelling crate, which is incredibly competitive space to play and one with shrouded with huge amounts of uncertainty, or whether it's now in business with what you're doing with your brands there and your investments. So my question is, what is it about you in your self-diagnosis that has made you rise to the top in those pursuits? That's it. Good question.
And also I had to come from. These are the ones I wanted to start off with, and that was I questioned why men weren't in the same position as the female supermodels. And you had the equivalent of the male supermodels at the time, and you always have that, but they were never to that level of fame, of financial rewards as the female supermodels. And I questioned that that was all and thought, is there a possibility?
Is there almost, I suppose, a gap in the market? The first five years, no one actually realised is that I really didn't do that much for the first five or six years. It was, you know, of course, we didn't struggle when it was a lot of, you know, sort of, like, a cattle of work earning really good money or wasn't what I wanted to do. But they got to work with, you know, like, Sir Chrissy Jones and Naomi Campbell and this big one, I just observed them and asked them questions and sort of got the answers I wanted and I realised that it was a business one.
They had great teams, they had great agencies, they had PRs and PAs, it was run as a business. And then you had the guys, you know, who were the top of the fashion at the time, it wasn't a business one. It was a lovely way of making a living and they were fortunate to be there, some of the time not even admitting that they were models, they were in appetising a marketing, as a lot of people used to say. And I just used the female platform and I went to my age, the Tandy Anson and said, I don't want to do this, commercial work anymore.
It doesn't satisfy me, it's not when she said what you want to do. I said, if I'm going to do this, I want to be the best at it. And she said, right, literally from tomorrow, I've saved this a million times. You have to stop all that commercial work because you have to be perceived and it's in a total different light to get to where you want to be.
So every bit of that work, I said, we're earning very good money. I just quit everything. We said no to all the campaign, no to all the catalogs. And she said to me, like in a position, that's what most models are dreaming of, only what, not dreaming of, but that's, you know, they see you're just an enviable position.
I said, that's just not what I want to do, I'm not happy doing it. So to me, I had nothing to lose because I wouldn't carry it on. So we then started building up this other perception of me within the fashion industry, not the catalogue model, not the commercial model, but editorial, a bit more sort of fashion based. And that's when we instigated a meeting with the Dolce and Gabbana.
And that's when I did the campaign, the campaign led to light blue and light blue was to me and took in the box for them to achieve what I wanted to achieve. And it was phenomenal success and it still is. But that was what I needed. That was the platform pretty much from there.
And then we could put the team together to say, where do you want to be in three years? Where's the next three years after that? Where do you want to achieve? And I'm big believer in having goals, not always having to achieve them.
Things change when I'm big believer in having goals so you know roughly where you want to end up. That's something, and then game is a life is like a game chess and you're moving pieces to get to that checkmate to where you want to be. Often it diverts and you have to have different tactics, but you have to have the ambition to know the exact point to where you want to be. Of course, when you get there and being a maybe notable or a typical person I am, then I want to the next thing and I'm particularly satisfied.
And I've achieved that. So what's next to you? Where do you go from there? What role do you think luck has played?
As you view your journey in hindsight, what role, you know, everyone, especially very successful people will always have a different relationship with luck. What role do you think luck has played in your journey and however you define luck? It annoys me if someone says, you're very lucky. And I feel like I have to go on the statement, but hang on, let me just tell you about it.
You haven't seen the hard work this long, isn't it?