Milda Mitkutė was altering residences in Vilnius in 2008 and had extra garments than the brand new place may maintain. Reasonably than throw them out, she wished a option to cross them on to individuals 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 individuals may commerce their pre-loved style with one another,” Janauskas later informed Tech.eu in 2015, recalling that he was uncertain the thought would go anyplace till he requested round and located most of his associates thought it was a great one.
The 2 of them constructed the earliest model as a facet mission, beneath a Lithuanian title that translated roughly to “my garments,” with no advertising and marketing finances and no plan past associates buying and selling with associates. What tipped it into one thing bigger was virtually unintended. A couch-surfing visitor from Munich discovered concerning the web site, appreciated it, and helped carry the thought into Germany, the place it launched beneath its personal native title, Kleiderkreisel. Different country-specific spin-offs adopted the identical sample for just a few years, every with its personal title and its personal small person base, earlier than the corporate folded them collectively beneath a single model, Vinted, because the mum or dad enterprise determined a fragmented set of native websites made much less sense than one platform customers may 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 skin is that itemizing and promoting on the platform prices a vendor nothing. Vinted makes its cash virtually completely from the customer’s facet of the transaction: a set price of roughly $0.70 plus a variable price of about 5 p.c of the merchandise’s worth, charged within the purchaser’s native forex (figures as of late 2025) — in keeping with Vinted’s personal Purchaser Safety price web page. That price covers cost processing and the price of the pay as you go delivery label the vendor is given without cost. It’s near the inverse of how rivals like Poshmark and Depop have traditionally operated, charging the vendor a reduce as an alternative. Vinted additionally sells optionally available promotion to sellers who need extra visibility: a characteristic known as Closet Highlight places 5 of a vendor’s listings into different customers’ feeds for every week for a flat price, and a per-item “bump” pushes a single itemizing up in search outcomes, priced dynamically by class and demand.
From a pastime web site to a logistics community
Beneath the price construction sits a more durable downside: 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 line with the corporate’s personal 2025 monetary outcomes, its supply associate community now provides 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, straight 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 levels, and the tempo of it tracks how shortly buyers 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 taking part, pushing its valuation previous $1 billion for the primary time and making it, in keeping with the reporting on the spherical, Lithuania’s first unicorn. Lightspeed associate Brad Twohig mentioned on the time the agency regarded for “outlier administration groups constructing generational firms,” a reasonably customary 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 associates.
Two years later, in 2021, an extra spherical led by EQT Progress introduced in $303 million and roughly quadrupled the valuation once more, to $4.5 billion, with the identical core group of earlier buyers returning. That was the final exterior funding spherical earlier than the corporate turned its first revenue in 2023, at which level continued progress may more and more be funded from the enterprise itself fairly than from new buyers.
What the 2025 numbers really 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 Internet lined as the corporate’s first since founding. Two years later, the image is greater however much less straightforwardly higher. Vinted moved €10.8 billion in gross merchandise worth in 2025, up 47 p.c on the 12 months earlier than, and took €1.1 billion of that as income, up 38 p.c, virtually double the 2023 determine. However internet revenue, which had grown considerably within the years after 2023, fell 19 p.c in 2025 to €62 million, and adjusted EBITDA slipped 5 p.c to €151 million. CEO Thomas Plantenga framed the trade-off plainly within the launch: the corporate is spending on enlargement, together with a push into Germany, class diversification past clothes, and the launch of a funds pockets known as Vinted Pay, fairly than banking the expansion as revenue this 12 months.
That may be a firm selecting to spend sooner than it earns whereas the market continues to be there to be taken, not an organization in hassle. It’s value naming the excellence as a result of the 2 can look related on a spreadsheet, and a 19 p.c drop in revenue reads very in a different way as soon as it’s clear the corporate was worthwhile in any respect solely two years earlier, and continues to be worthwhile now, simply much less so by design.
A platform constructed on different individuals’s closets
What the €10.8 billion determine represents is how far secondhand clothes has moved from a pastime into odd shopper behaviour throughout Europe. The corporate has mentioned it intends to deliver the identical mannequin to america subsequent, in keeping with Dealroom’s protection of the 2025 outcomes. Whether or not Vinted’s European logistics playbook, constructed over seventeen years and lots of of hundreds of parcel factors, transfers to a market with a totally completely different postal and returns infrastructure is the open query the 2025 numbers don’t reply.
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