VINTED

In 2008, Milda Mitkutė had a problem. She was moving apartments in Vilnius, Lithuania, and had more clothes than she could take with her.

She didn't want to throw them out. She didn't want to donate them.

She wanted to sell them — but there was no easy way to do that in Lithuania at the time. She called up her friend Justas Janauskas, a developer, and said something close to: 'Build me a thing where I can sell my clothes.' He did.

The first version was a simple Lithuanian-language platform for women to swap and sell clothing. It had no grand vision, no pitch deck, no VC backing.

It was a solution to a specific, annoying problem. The early community grew by word of mouth among Lithuanian women who had the same problem Milda had.

Too many clothes, not enough buyer.

By 2012, they'd expanded into Germany and then Poland. By 2016, they were in France — which turned out to be the market that changed everything.

France loved secondhand fashion in a way that Germany and Eastern Europe hadn't fully unlocked yet. Vinted hit a cultural moment: sustainability was becoming a genuine concern, fast fashion was getting bad press, and buying pre-owned clothes was slowly shedding its stigma.

Vinted didn't create that shift. But they were in exactly the right place when it happened.

Here's the counterintuitive thing about Vinted: sellers pay nothing. No listing fees, no commission on sales, no monthly subscription.

You list your items, someone buys them, you get the full price. That's it.

So how does Vinted make money? Buyers pay it.

When you purchase something on Vinted, you pay a buyer protection fee — typically 3–8% of the item price plus a fixed charge. That fee covers buyer protection, secure payment handling, and customer support.

The seller sees none of it. It goes to Vinted.

This was the key insight that unlocked growth. Every other resale platform at the time charged sellers.

eBay took a cut. Depop took 10%.

Even Facebook Marketplace had its fees. The moment Vinted made listing free for sellers, the supply side exploded.

More listings meant more buyers. More buyers meant more listings.

The flywheel spun.

They've since added optional paid features for sellers — 'Wardrobe Spotlight' lets you promote listings for a fee. But the core model remains: free to sell, small fee to buy safely.

It's a clean, simple loop that keeps supply high and friction low.

The core product is the Vinted marketplace app — available in 19+ European markets plus Canada and the US. You photograph your clothes, set a price, list them for free, and buyers come to you.

The app handles messaging, secure payment, and shipping label generation. It's genuinely simple in a way that peer-to-peer resale often isn't.

Vinted Go is their logistics play — a network of parcel lockers and pickup points across Europe that makes shipping secondhand items cheaper and more convenient than going to a post office. It removes one of the biggest friction points in resale: the hassle of actually getting the item to the buyer.

Wardrobe Spotlight is the seller-side paid feature — you pay to push your listings higher in search results and feeds. Think of it as self-serve advertising for individual wardrobes.

It's optional, but it works, and it's become a meaningful revenue line for the business.

Vinted also runs a separate platform called Vinted Pro for professional resellers and small businesses — a quieter part of the product that acknowledges the reality that a lot of 'casual' sellers on the platform are actually running small businesses.

The move that actually made Vinted was a near-death experience. In 2012, the company was struggling.

They'd tried a commission model, it wasn't working, user growth had stalled, and they were burning through what little cash they had. Thomaas Plantenga — who would later become CEO — was brought in to fix it.

The decision they made was the opposite of what every marketplace consultant would have advised: they scrapped all seller fees entirely and went free. Revenue dropped to almost nothing overnight.

The team nearly mutinied. But within weeks, new listings flooded in, and active users started climbing in a way they hadn't before.

The second growth lever was France. When Vinted launched in France properly around 2013–2015, they went heavy on TV advertising at a time when most startups had written off traditional media as old-fashioned and expensive.

It worked. French women in particular adopted the platform fast, and France became Vinted's biggest market.

That counterintuitive bet on TV — while everyone else was spending on digital — gave them reach that pure social campaigns couldn't touch.

They also leaned into community over algorithm. Vinted's feed feels personal.

You follow sellers, favourite items, leave reviews. It's more like a social app than a shop.

That stickiness kept users coming back even when they weren't buying.

Vinted's biggest structural challenge is trust — specifically, keeping a two-sided marketplace clean when it's processing millions of peer-to-peer transactions between strangers. Fraud is a constant problem.

Fake items, counterfeit goods, buyers claiming packages never arrived — all of it requires a customer support operation that scales with the platform, which is expensive and slow.

France's VINTED has also faced legal scrutiny. In 2023, France's government began requiring platforms like Vinted to report sellers who make more than €2,000 per year or complete more than 30 transactions — creating tax obligations that some casual sellers hadn't anticipated.

The EU's DAC7 directive rolled this out platform-wide across member states. For a platform built on the promise that selling is easy and free, adding a tax-reporting layer creates friction that could suppress supply.

Then there's the sustainability narrative. Vinted markets itself as an eco-friendly alternative to fast fashion.

Critics have pointed out that secondhand marketplaces can actually increase overall consumption — people buy more used items than they would have bought new, and some sellers use Vinted as a revolving door to buy fast fashion and flip it. Whether Vinted is genuinely reducing fashion's environmental impact or just changing where the waste happens is a legitimate question the company doesn't love answering.

Vinted's early investors were mostly European and relatively patient — which makes sense for a company that took nearly a decade to become a proper unicorn. The cap table reflects a business that grew steadily rather than exploding overnight.

Institutional backing started arriving meaningfully around 2019, when Vinted raised $141 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. That round valued the company at over $1 billion — officially making Vinted Europe's first Lithuanian unicorn, which made headlines in a country that doesn't usually appear in TechCrunch.

Lightspeed's involvement brought credibility and a network that helped Vinted accelerate its push into Western European markets.

The bigger moment came in 2021, when Vinted raised $303 million in a Series F round led by EQT Growth, with Sprints Capital and other existing investors participating. That round pushed the valuation to $4.5 billion and gave Vinted the capital to invest in logistics, expand internationally, and build Vinted Go.

EQT is a major European growth equity player — their backing signalled that Vinted was a serious European tech company, not just a niche app.

Practica Capital and Burda Principal Investments were earlier backers from the Lithuanian and Eastern European ecosystem. Having local investors who understood the market early was part of why Vinted didn't get crushed by Western competitors who might have entered the space with more capital but less community insight.