Milda Mitkutė was altering flats in Vilnius in 2008 and had extra garments than the brand new place might maintain. Quite than throw them out, she wished a strategy to cross them on to folks she knew. A pal, the software program developer Justas Janauskas, constructed her a web site for it. “We chatted about creating a web site the place folks might commerce their pre-loved vogue with one another,” Janauskas later instructed Tech.eu in 2015, recalling that he was uncertain the thought would go anyplace till he requested round and located most of his mates thought it was a very good one.
The 2 of them constructed the earliest model as a facet challenge, beneath a Lithuanian identify that translated roughly to “my garments,” with no advertising and marketing funds and no plan past mates buying and selling with mates. What tipped it into one thing bigger was nearly unintended. A couch-surfing visitor from Munich realized concerning the web site, favored it, and helped carry the thought into Germany, the place it launched beneath its personal native identify, Kleiderkreisel. Different country-specific spin-offs adopted the identical sample for a number of years, every with its personal identify and its personal small consumer base, earlier than the corporate folded them collectively beneath a single model, Vinted, because the guardian enterprise determined a fragmented set of native websites made much less sense than one platform customers might recognise anyplace in Europe. Vilnius stayed its house all through.
How a free itemizing web site turns a revenue
The a part of Vinted’s mannequin that isn’t apparent from the surface is that itemizing and promoting on the platform prices a vendor nothing. Vinted makes its cash nearly completely from the client’s facet of the transaction: a hard and fast charge of roughly $0.70 plus a variable charge of about 5 % of the merchandise’s worth, charged within the purchaser’s native foreign money (figures as of late 2025) — in line with Vinted’s personal Purchaser Safety charge web page. That charge covers fee processing and the price of the pay as you go delivery label the vendor is given free of charge. It’s near the inverse of how rivals like Poshmark and Depop have traditionally operated, charging the vendor a minimize as a substitute. Vinted additionally sells non-compulsory promotion to sellers who need extra visibility: a characteristic referred to as Closet Highlight places 5 of a vendor’s listings into different customers’ feeds for every week for a flat charge, and a per-item “bump” pushes a single itemizing up in search outcomes, priced dynamically by class and demand.
From a interest web site to a logistics community
Beneath the charge construction sits a more durable drawback: getting a stranger’s outdated jumper from a vendor’s flat to a purchaser’s entrance door, cheaply and reliably, throughout dozens of nations. That has turned Vinted into as a lot a logistics firm as a market. In response to the corporate’s personal 2025 monetary outcomes, its supply companion community now offers customers entry to greater than 500,000 pick-up and drop-off factors throughout Europe, and the corporate runs its personal parcel provider, Vinted Go, instantly in 5 markets: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. In 2025 it additionally opened operations in Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia, seventeen years after that first Vilnius web site, extending its attain into corners of Europe the unique Kleiderkreisel-era patchwork of native websites by no means touched.
From a free web site to a billion-dollar firm
The cash that constructed out Vinted’s logistics community got here in phases, and the tempo of it tracks how shortly traders determined the mannequin was working. In November 2019, the corporate raised €128 million in a spherical led by Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, with Accel, Perception Companions, Sprints Capital and Burda Principal Investments additionally collaborating, pushing its valuation previous $1 billion for the primary time and making it, in line with the reporting on the spherical, Lithuania’s first unicorn. Lightspeed companion Brad Twohig stated on the time the agency regarded for “outlier administration groups constructing generational corporations,” a reasonably commonplace line for a enterprise press launch, however one which on this case was describing two individuals who had began out fixing an issue for their very own mates.
Two years later, in 2021, an extra spherical led by EQT Development introduced in $303 million and roughly quadrupled the valuation once more, to $4.5 billion, with the identical core group of earlier traders returning. That was the final exterior funding spherical earlier than the corporate turned its first revenue in 2023, at which level continued progress might more and more be funded from the enterprise itself slightly than from new traders.
What the 2025 numbers truly present
Vinted’s first worthwhile 12 months, by its personal account, was 2023, when it reported income of €596.3 million and a internet revenue of €17.8 million, a milestone The Subsequent Net lined as the corporate’s first since founding. Two years later, the image is larger however much less straightforwardly higher. Vinted moved €10.8 billion in gross merchandise worth in 2025, up 47 % on the 12 months earlier than, and took €1.1 billion of that as income, up 38 %, nearly double the 2023 determine. However internet revenue, which had grown considerably within the years after 2023, fell 19 % in 2025 to €62 million, and adjusted EBITDA slipped 5 % to €151 million. CEO Thomas Plantenga framed the trade-off plainly within the launch: the corporate is spending on growth, together with a push into Germany, class diversification past clothes, and the launch of a funds pockets referred to as Vinted Pay, slightly than banking the expansion as revenue this 12 months.
That may be a firm selecting to spend sooner than it earns whereas the market remains to be there to be taken, not an organization in bother. It’s price naming the excellence as a result of the 2 can look related on a spreadsheet, and a 19 % drop in revenue reads very in another way as soon as it’s clear the corporate was worthwhile in any respect solely two years earlier, and remains to be worthwhile now, simply much less so by design.
A platform constructed on different folks’s closets
What the €10.8 billion determine represents is how far secondhand clothes has moved from a interest into extraordinary client behaviour throughout Europe. The corporate has stated it intends to convey the identical mannequin to the USA subsequent, in line with Dealroom’s protection of the 2025 outcomes. Whether or not Vinted’s European logistics playbook, constructed over seventeen years and a whole bunch of 1000’s of parcel factors, transfers to a market with a very totally different postal and returns infrastructure is the open query the 2025 numbers don’t reply.
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