The offices were emptying out. San Francisco first, then London, Munich, Paris—all shuttered within months. For most startups, closing four international offices simultaneously signals one thing: the end. But for Vinted, the Lithuanian secondhand fashion marketplace that had somehow managed to burn through $60 million while pioneering a model nobody particularly liked, it was the beginning of something else entirely.
Thomas Plantenga arrived in Vilnius in May 2016 as a consultant, the kind brought in when investors need someone to deliver hard truths. What he found was grimmer than expected. A company that had expanded with the enthusiasm typical of well-funded startups in the mid-2010s, opening offices because that's what you did, hiring because headcount signaled growth. And hemorrhaging cash on a business model—charging sellers for every listing—that made less sense the longer anyone looked at it.
Eight years later, Vinted is worth €5 billion. It posted €76.7 million in net profit last year. It's become, improbably, the most profitable player in European resale. The distance between those two points? A decision that seemed, at the time, borderline insane.
"We basically stopped charging sellers," Plantenga told FashionUnited in 2019, with the kind of understatement that comes after a bet pays off. Instead, Vinted introduced a buyer protection fee. In marketplace economics, conventional wisdom says you monetize supply, not demand. Suppliers are supposed to pay for access to buyers. Vinted flipped the script.
The Student Project That Scaled Too Fast
Milda Mitkutė was 23 in 2008, facing a familiar post-college problem: too many clothes, not enough closet space. She was moving, needed to offload her wardrobe, and couldn't find a decent platform to do it. So she and Justas Janauskas, an engineer, built one. He knocked out the first version in about ten days. They called it manodrabuziai.lt—"my clothes" in Lithuanian—and launched it locally in Vilnius.
Within a year they were expanding into Germany and the Czech Republic, which in hindsight looks like the first sign of a pattern: move fast, maybe too fast. By 2013, Accel had led a $6.5 million Series A. The growth metrics looked good enough. A $27 million Series B followed in 2014 from Insight Partners and Accel, timed with a U.S. launch that leaned into mobile. Another $27 million came in 2015 from Hubert Burda Media.
On paper, it all made sense. Secondhand fashion was heating up. Sustainability was becoming a selling point. The company was opening offices, hiring teams, chasing that multi-market playbook that venture capital tends to reward. But the model itself—charging sellers listing fees—was creating friction in the wrong place. Sellers hesitated. Inventory stalled. Free platforms like Facebook Marketplace were gaining traction. By early 2016, Vinted faced the choice most struggling startups eventually confront: raise another expensive round to keep burning cash, or rethink everything.
The Turnaround Nobody Saw Coming
Plantenga came from New York, where he'd been working with Fabrice Grinda, the serial entrepreneur behind OLX and FJ Labs. Insight Partners, already an investor, brought him in to assess whether Vinted could be saved. The diagnosis was blunt: the company had spread itself too thin across too many markets without actually nailing the economics in any of them.
What followed was the kind of consolidation that feels brutal in the moment. Vinted closed four offices. Centralized everything in Vilnius, where costs were lower and the original team still operated. Headcount shrank. The company pulled back to just two core markets: France and Germany. And then, the big one: they eliminated seller fees entirely.
Now sellers could list for free. Buyers paid a protection fee instead—typically around €0.70 plus 5% of the purchase price—which covered payment processing, customer support, and refund guarantees. The logic, in retrospect, seems obvious. Remove friction from supply, flood the platform with inventory, make it more attractive to buyers. Monetize the transaction, not the listing. Align incentives.
But obvious in retrospect isn't the same as obvious at the time. Plenty of marketplace operators had considered this model and rejected it. Buyers, after all, have alternatives. Why would they pay extra?
Turned out, they would. By September 2018, Vinted had raised €50 million from Sprints Capital. Revenue was climbing. The model was working. In November 2019, Lightspeed led a €128 million Series E that pushed Vinted past the €1 billion valuation mark, making it Lithuania's first unicorn. Which, for a country of 2.8 million people with no prior tech unicorns, wasn't nothing.
The Hard Part: Making It Profitable
Profitability, though, didn't arrive overnight. Vinted spent the next few years tackling the hardest operational challenge in C2C fashion resale: how do you ship a €15 dress without losing money on every transaction?
The answer, it turned out, required building infrastructure from scratch. In 2022, Vinted launched Vinted Go, a logistics brand focused on out-of-home delivery—lockers, pick-up and drop-off points, anything to avoid the cost nightmare of doorstep delivery for low-value items. The company started installing its own lockers in Paris. By the end of 2023, it had roughly 1,500 PUDO points in France alone. That December, Vinted Go was handling more than 400,000 parcels.
The company also struck multi-year partnerships with InPost and Mondial Relay, gaining access to over 82,000 lockers and collection points across eight European markets. The InPost deal was renewed in April 2025, extending through 2027. By that point, Vinted Go had expanded into Spain and Portugal, using Bloq.it for locker infrastructure in Madrid. The company announced a B2B shipping platform, leveraging access to 220,000 PUDO points and handling nearly 200 million parcels annually. Domestic deliveries averaged 2–3 days; cross-border shipments ran 3–5 days.
Then came payments. In September 2023, Vinted secured an electronic money institution license from the Bank of Lithuania and launched Vinted Pay. The move brought payment processing in-house, cutting third-party fees and giving the company more control over the transaction experience. For a marketplace, owning payments isn't just about cost savings—it's about data, customer experience, and reducing friction at checkout.
And in April 2025, Vinted introduced Vinted Ventures, an investment arm targeting Series A–C re-commerce companies with tickets between €500,000 and €10 million. The pitch: operator insight from a company that had already scaled this model and lived to tell about it.
The Numbers
In 2023, Vinted posted its first annual profit. Revenue hit €596.3 million. Net profit came in at €17.8 million. Adjusted EBITDA reached €76.6 million. The company secured a €50 million revolving credit facility from BNP Paribas and ING—the kind of financing that suggests banks believe the business is real.
The 2024 results were sharper. Revenue climbed 36% to €813.4 million. Net profit quadrupled to €76.7 million, a 330% jump year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA hit €158.9 million. Headcount surpassed 2,000.
In October 2024, Vinted completed a €340 million secondary share sale led by TPG, valuing the company at €5 billion. By November 2025, the Financial Times reported that Vinted was exploring another secondary round at roughly €8 billion. Gross merchandise volume was estimated near €10 billion—a figure that, if accurate, puts Vinted in rare company among European consumer marketplaces.
Expanding Beyond the Wardrobe
Clothing remains the core, but Vinted has been testing the edges. In 2024, it added electronics to the platform, alongside existing categories like home goods, books, and collectibles. The company has been active on the M&A front too, acquiring and integrating competitors: Chicfy in Spain in 2019, United Wardrobe in the Netherlands in 2020, Rebelle (a luxury platform) in 2022, and Trendsales in Denmark in 2024. It merged Germany's Kleiderkreisel and Mamikreisel into the Vinted brand in November 2020.
Geographically, the footprint kept growing. Vinted launched in Sweden in October 2022, Denmark in September 2023, and Finland later that year. In 2024, it entered Croatia, Greece, and Ireland. The Nordic markets showed early promise: by the end of 2023, Sweden alone hit an annualized GMV of €39 million with over 1 million transactions in Q4.
There have been exits, too. Vinted closed its Canadian operation in February 2024, citing inefficiencies with the separate tech platform it had been running there. Perhaps more honestly, Canada wasn't working.
In March 2025, Vinted introduced "House of Vinted," a curated luxury offering featuring designers' wardrobes with in-house authentication—infrastructure inherited from the Rebelle acquisition. The company also launched brand campaigns throughout 2025, including "New Again" in February and "New Eras Again" in September, positioning itself as more than just a fashion resale site.
The Competitive Reality
Vinted's profitability stands out, and not just because profitability is rare in this sector. Depop, Poshmark, Vestiaire Collective, The RealReal—all reported losses in 2024. ThredUp's 2025 resale report projected the global secondhand fashion market would reach $367 billion by 2029, with online resale hitting $40 billion. Resale is growing faster than the broader apparel market, which makes Vinted's ability to turn a profit all the more notable.
The advantage appears structural. The buyer protection fee model generates revenue at scale without choking supply. The logistics infrastructure cuts costs and speeds delivery. The payments license reduces transaction friction. And centralized operations in Vilnius keep overhead lower than competitors based in London, New York, or San Francisco.
It hasn't all been smooth. In May 2021, French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir launched a class action alleging Vinted's buyer protection fee was misleadingly presented as optional. Poland's competition authority fined Vinted 5.36 million złoty in May 2022 for similar concerns; Vinted appealed. In July 2024, Lithuania's data protection authority, working with France's CNIL, fined Vinted €2.38 million for GDPR violations related to data access, erasure, and identity verification. And in August 2025, The Guardian reported on user harassment and image theft on the platform, prompting Vinted to cite its zero-tolerance policies and reporting tools.
Still, the trajectory is unmistakable. From near-death in 2016 to a profitable, eight-billion-euro marketplace in 2025, Vinted offers something rare in startup narratives: a counter-example to the "growth at all costs" playbook. It closed offices. It cut markets. It flipped its revenue model upside down. And somehow, improbably, it worked.
