Vinted just posted £9.5 billion in gross merchandise value — and it started as a favor to help a friend clear out her wardrobe.
The Lithuanian resale platform reported revenues of just under £1 billion for the most recent financial year, a 38% jump that reflects both disciplined category expansion and a consumer base increasingly comfortable buying and selling used goods. GMV climbed 47% year-on-year, a figure that tells the deeper story: the volume of actual transactions is accelerating faster than the platform's cut of them, suggesting Vinted is still in growth mode rather than extraction mode.
From Wardrobe Clear-Out to Nine-Figure Revenue Machine
The origin story matters here. In 2008, co-founder Justas Janauskas built what amounted to a digital garage sale to help his friend Milda Mitkute declutter before moving house. That modest utility — helping someone get rid of things they no longer needed — turned out to be extraordinarily scalable. Sixteen years later, the platform operates across much of Europe, has recently entered the US and Estonia, and has just begun cracking categories well beyond fashion.
Electronics, homeware, bedding, and pet accessories now sit alongside the second-hand Zara blouses and vintage denim that made the platform's name. This diversification is strategically significant. Fashion resale, while large, is intensely competitive — Depop, ThredUp, Poshmark, and eBay's own marketplace all compete for the same seller. By broadening into adjacent categories, Vinted is positioning itself less as a fashion app and more as a general pre-owned goods marketplace, a positioning that opens up a substantially larger total addressable market.
The Profit Dip Is Deliberate — and Probably the Right Call
Profit fell from £67 million in 2024 to £54 million, a decline of roughly 19%. On its face, that looks like deteriorating efficiency. In context, it looks more like calculated reinvestment.
Launching in new geographies is expensive. The US market in particular demands heavy marketing spend to build brand awareness against deeply entrenched domestic players. Category expansion requires new logistics partnerships, seller education, and fraud-prevention tooling — none of which comes cheap. Vinted's management appears to be deliberately accepting margin compression now in exchange for a larger, more diversified revenue base later. Given that GMV is growing faster than revenue, the platform likely has pricing leverage it hasn't fully pulled yet.
For context, compare this approach to Depop's trajectory. The London-based rival sold to eBay in 2021 for roughly £890 million — a respectable exit at the time, but one that now looks conservative given where the resale market has moved. Depop had built a loyal, fashion-forward community but never fully cracked the category or geographic diversification problem. Vinted, by contrast, appears determined to build the infrastructure for a much larger outcome before any liquidity event.
Why Fast Fashion's Decline Is Vinted's Tailwind
The timing of Vinted's expansion coincides with visible trouble at the other end of the fashion market. ASOS has issued multiple profit warnings. Boohoo has faced sustained pressure on both its business model and its brand reputation among younger consumers who have grown more skeptical of disposable, low-cost fashion. The environmental critique of the fast fashion industry has graduated from niche concern to mainstream sentiment, particularly among 18-35 year olds — the exact demographic that Vinted courts.
Retail analyst Richard Hyman put his finger on a real cultural shift when he noted the semantic trick that unlocked mass adoption: rebranding "second-hand" as "pre-loved." That reframing isn't trivial. It transformed the act of buying used goods from a signal of necessity into a signal of taste and environmental awareness. Sellers on Vinted aren't offloading cast-offs; they're curating. Buyers aren't making do; they're shopping smartly. The platform's growth is partly a product of that repositioned identity.
Jonathan De Mello's observation about "squeezed middle-class wallets" adds the economic dimension. The cost-of-living pressures that have reshaped household spending across Europe and the UK haven't just pushed lower-income consumers toward resale — they've brought in a cohort of buyers who would previously have defaulted to new goods. Once those buyers experience the value equation on Vinted, many don't revert.
The Macroeconomic Hedge Hidden in the Business Model
CEO Thomas Plantenga's comments to Reuters about geopolitical instability and consumer pressure deserve more attention than they typically receive in coverage of this kind. He suggested, diplomatically, that an environment where consumers feel financial pressure tends to drive more activity on Vinted — both from sellers looking to monetize unused items and from buyers hunting value.
This is a structural feature of the resale model that sets it apart from most retail businesses. Traditional retailers suffer in downturns as consumers defer purchases. Vinted benefits twice over: more sellers enter the market, and more buyers become price-sensitive enough to consider used goods. The platform functions, in effect, as a consumer recession hedge — a marketplace that gets more useful precisely when economic conditions deteriorate.
With energy costs volatile, food inflation still elevated in parts of Europe, and Middle East tensions adding uncertainty to oil markets, that hedge may be tested sooner rather than later. If it holds, Vinted's growth trajectory could accelerate further.
The £7 Billion Question
Vinted was valued at £4.4 billion in a secondary share sale in October 2024. By November, the Financial Times was reporting that the company was exploring another secondary transaction — this time at a valuation closer to £7 billion. That's a 59% jump in implied value in roughly a month, which either reflects exceptional momentum or aggressive negotiating positioning (likely both).
Plantenga has ruled out a near-term IPO, which is consistent with a company that still has significant reinvestment priorities and no immediate need for public capital. Its existing backers — Accel, Lightspeed, and EQT — are sophisticated enough to manage their exposure through secondary sales rather than pushing for a premature listing.
The more interesting question is what Vinted looks like at £15-20 billion GMV, a scale it could plausibly reach within three to four years if US expansion gains traction. At that point, the platform would likely be too large and too diversified to be categorized primarily as a fashion resale app — and too valuable for its current backers to hold indefinitely. The IPO conversation will resurface. The question is whether Vinted will have built enough of a moat in general pre-owned commerce to justify the kind of multiple that would make a public listing genuinely transformative rather than merely lucrative.
What started as a website for clearing out one wardrobe may end up reshaping how an entire generation thinks about ownership, consumption, and retail. The ping of the Vinted app, as De Mello notes, has become background noise in millions of households. That kind of behavioral entrenchment is extraordinarily hard to displace — and that's ultimately what the £7 billion valuation is betting on.