Today marks 30 years since five girls in platform boots and Union Jack dresses burst onto our TV screens and told the world exactly what they wanted, what they really, really wanted.
Wannabe wasn’t just a number one single. Looking back, it was basically a business masterclass, and one I didn’t even realise I’d absorbed until I was years into building Rebox HR from my living room.
So indulge me and enjoy some 90’s nostalgia. Here’s how five girls from the 90s ended up shaping how I run a company that supports over 260 businesses across the UK.
When one door closes, go and knock on another one!
Before they were the biggest girl group on the planet, the Spice Girls were turned away, underestimated, and told no more times than most of us would like to admit to. They didn’t get the answer they wanted from one place, so they simply moved on to the next door and knocked louder.
That’s the whole story of Rebox HR, if I’m honest. When I started this business, I heard plenty of “no.” No from people who thought SMEs didn’t need proper HR support. No from people who thought a small consultancy from Daventry couldn’t compete with the big players. I didn’t sit there sulking outside a closed door — I found the next one. Then the next. Eventually, enough of them opened that we built something that now supports hundreds of businesses across the UK, with a genuine specialism in transport and logistics that nobody handed to us — we knocked our way into it.
Resilience isn’t glamorous. But it is, without question, the thing that gets you through the years nobody sees.
Underestimated? Hold my coffee…
Five singing girls with an attitude were written off constantly in the mid-90s. Not “serious” musicians, not going to last, just a fad. We know how that turned out — decades on, we’re still talking about them, and there’s a reason for that.
I know that feeling of being underestimated. A woman-led HR consultancy, built without a call centre, without an army of junior consultants, without following anyone else’s playbook — plenty of people assumed that meant small, or short-lived, or not to be taken seriously. Every single one of those assumptions has been quietly and thoroughly disproved. That’s the fun part about being underestimated, you get to enjoy proving people wrong at your own pace.
Lifting others up isn’t a side effect, it’s the point
What made the Spice Girls a genuine movement rather than just a pop act was the message underneath the songs. An entire generation of women grew up believing they could go for what they wanted, back their mates, and take on whatever was thrown at them.
That’s exactly what I’ve tried to build into Rebox HR. This was never just about running a successful consultancy for me, it’s about helping business owners feel confident enough to handle the tricky, human, sometimes messy stuff that comes with employing people. It’s about lifting up the SMEs who don’t have a big corporate HR department behind them and making sure they’ve got someone properly in their corner. Girl Power was never really about the five of them, it was about all of us. Good HR should feel the same way.
Thirty years on, the message still resonates
So as we hit the 30th anniversary of Wannabe, I’m raising my matcha to five girls who turned rejection into resilience, doubt into determination, and a pop song into a genuine cultural movement.
Building Rebox HR from a living room in 2020 to where it is today hasn’t been a straight line, it’s been a lot of closed doors, a lot of people underestimating what we were building, and a lot of showing up anyway. If there’s one thing three decades of Girl Power has taught me, it’s this: know what you want, say it loudly, back the people around you, and don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t get it.
Here’s to the next 30 years of doors opening — and to every woman out there still knocking on the ones that haven’t yet.
Girl Power, and good HR, forever.
Natalie Ellis HR 