ByBloomberg
Published July 28, 2026
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Vinted wants to bring its Depop-style disruption to the US
ByBloomberg
PublishedJuly 28, 2026
Thomas Plantenga unabashedly says he’s been “stealing” from companies across the globe. The chief executive officer of Vinted, Europe’s biggest consumer-to-consumer fashion marketplace, says he freely borrowed from their strategies to put together an online platform that’s now shaking up the region’s €500 billion ($573 billion) fashion industry
“I read a ton of business reports from Amazon, MercadoLibre, Mercari, Costco on how they work, what they do, and we’ve picked the elements of the best companies in the world to build a transactional marketplace for C2C which nobody’s ever built,” the 42-year-old Dutch-born executive said during an interview at Vinted’s headquarters in a four-storied building in the heart of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.Vinted’s office is in an area that’s just a short walk from the old city, with a mix of Soviet-era factories converted into trendy lofts, creative hubs, and sleek, modern business centers. Sitting in a glass-walled conference room in jorts and leather mules, Plantenga is relaxed and unhurried on that July day, matching the vibe around him as employees — many from Vinted’s European offices in town for its annual summer gathering — sit in open pantry areas, chatting over coffee.
Founded in 2008 as a platform for individuals to buy and sell secondhand clothes, Vinted has created such a formidable marketplace that the platform, along with some of its rivals, is eating into the sales of fashion and luxury houses. McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 report says the secondhand market will grow two to three times faster than the firsthand one from 2025 to 2027 as penny-pinching consumers seek bargains.“The risk for the overall sector is that secondhand clothing cannibalizes the sale of new fashion,” analysts at RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note this month, also pointing out that many international labels are rushing to blunt the impact with resale offers of their own.With the taboo around buying and selling secondhand clothes evaporating, celebrities like Paris Hilton, Paul Mescal and Chloë Sevigny openly talk about their sales on such platforms.On the popular podcast “Table Manners,” singer Suki Waterhouse said that’s how she buys vintage clothes. “I love Vinted,” she said.As economic necessity and a sustainability-conscious new generation lift the stigma around used clothes, about 60% of global consumers are likely to shop resale this year, McKinsey estimates, citing ThredUp and GlobalData.The figure is even higher in China, exceeding 70%, driven by demand for premium and branded items with affordable price tags.The global resale apparel market is expected to reach $317 billion by 2027, the consulting firm said, a 23% jump from last year. The scale and technology of the marketplaces have brought them to “an inflection point,” letting them turn millions of transactions into profits, the report said.“The real driver is the consumer,” said Poonam Goyal, a senior retail analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. After years of inflation, shoppers have become more value-conscious, while younger generations increasingly see buying secondhand as mainstream, she said. “People are proud of buying resale. They want to show off the deal they found. It’s a completely different mindset.”Vinted has led the pack in Europe by massively investing in logistics, payments and technology to draw in more buyers and sellers to its platform. That’s given it the scale and critical mass to keep it ahead of its rivals, with Wells Fargo analysts led by Ken Gawrelski calling it “a disruptive force in C2C commerce” in Western Europe.The company, valued at €8 billion during a secondary share sale this year, counts EQT, BlackRock, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Schroders Capital among investors, and is gearing up for what could be one of Europe’s largest technology-based initial public offerings in recent years.Although no decision has been made on advisers, timing or listing venue, Vinted has been preparing for it for quite some time, said Carolina Brochado, a partner at the Swedish private equity firm EQT who sits on the platform’s board. For now, however, the company’s management remains focused on expanding the business rather than rushing to market, she said. Plantenga’s more immediate challenge is cracking the US market. “In the middle of a US expansion, you’re not going to IPO — that’s nuts,” he saidThe US push pits Vinted against established rivals including the industry’s “original gangster” eBay, which this year bought fashion platform Depop for about $1.2 billion to strengthen its secondhand offering, Facebook Marketplace, Poshmark and ThredUp.“Whether we will be able to actually compete and win in that market is a very big question,” Plantenga said, declining to share details of its plans there.Vinted is in early-stage testing in the US and is encouraged by initial results, he said. Wells Fargo analysts covering eBay, said in their July note that Vinted’s US daily active users jumped more than six-fold in the second quarter from a year earlier following its January market entry.The global appetite for resale fashion has spawned a slew of players. They include platforms like Japan’s Mercari; the UK’s Hardly Ever Worn It and Depop; Vestiaire Collective in France; The RealReal in the US, among several others. Many have struggled to translate demand into consistent profitability. Vestiaire Collective expects to post its first annual profit in 2026, more than 15 years after it was created, while in Asia — one of the fastest-growing regions — platforms like Alibaba-backed Idle Fish, Poizon, Mercari and Kream are scaling rapidly.Access to inventory — either through brands looking to offload excess supplies or individuals looking to make a buck from items they no longer wear — is one of the biggest hurdles for the platforms.After taking over in 2016, Vinted’s Plantenga overhauled the company’s business model, most notably by removing seller fees and charging buyers instead. The changes attracted more inventory, improved marketplace liquidity and laid the foundation for profitability, allowing Vinted to invest heavily in its infrastructure that investors now view as its key competitive advantage.Vinted processed €10.8 billion of merchandise in 2025, up 47% from a year earlier, while revenue rose 38% to €1.1 billion. Net profit fell 19% to €62 million as it accelerated investment in Germany and in Vinted Go, its logistics business. That drop didn’t stop investors from valuing the company at €8 billion this year, up from €5 billion in 2024.Sweden’s EQT, which first invested in Vinted in 2021 and remains one of its largest shareholders, argues the company’s competitive advantage now extends well beyond secondhand fashion. Brochado says the company increasingly resembles scaled marketplace companies like Airbnb, Uber and MercadoLibre because of its network effects, technology infrastructure and expanding ecosystem.“Vinted has the potential to become the Amazon of secondhand,” she said.The company has continued expanding across Europe and entered new product categories, including electronics, books and toys. Through Vinted Go, it operates more than 18,000 pickup and drop-off points across Europe, including lockers and designated shops, while Vinted Pay extends its reach into the payments ecosystem.Vinted’s model is simple: Selling on the platform is free for the seller, who gets to keep 100% of the listed price. Sellers simply take photos of the items they want to sell, add a description, set the price and publish the listing on the app. When someone purchases an item, Vinted charges the buyer a small fee and provides the seller with a pre-paid shipping label. The seller then packs the item and drops it off at a local shipping point. Once the buyer acknowledges receipt, Vinted releases the money into the seller’s virtual wallet.Erika Orlovskiene, a Vilnius-based mother of two, has used Vinted for nearly a decade to buy and sell everything from children’s clothes and dresses to books and a fish tank.“Kids outgrow clothes so fast — it piles up quickly, and what do you do with clothes that are barely worn?” she said, estimating that she had saved “thousands of euros” over the years. “It’s not only about saving, it’s also about sustainability.”As its users have grown, Vinted has plowed resources into building its own shipping infrastructure, payment systems and customer support software. It even runs its own servers rather than using cloud services — unglamorous investments, Plantenga acknowledged, but ones that underpin its cost advantage.“Everything Vinted is doing on the shipping side and the payments side is in service of the marketplace,” EQT’s Brochado said, arguing lower transaction costs ultimately benefit consumers while reinforcing the platform’s economics.It’s that model that the company wants to bring to the US. Whether Vinted’s buyer-fee service can be replicated in the US remains an open question. Bloomberg Intelligence’s Goyal says US buyers would be much more resistant to paying a fee, especially if it’s added in separately instead of being built into the price.But “if they can make it work in the US, they could end up setting a new standard that competitors might eventually follow, making the whole sector more profitable,” she said.Plantenga said he’s already seeing signs of the shift. Rivals including Poshmark, Depop and Mercari have all moved toward Vinted’s buyer-fee model in recent years — a sign, he argued, that the European approach is setting the industry standard. Depop, which has stuck with the model and uses celebrities like popstar Zara Larsson to show how easy it is to list on the platform, is now the strongest performer of the three.Meanwhile, traditional retailers — acting on the belief that if you can’t beat them you need to join them — are diving into resale. H&M acquired a majority stake in Swedish resale platform Sellpy in 2019, while Zalando has expanded its pre-owned offering and partnered with Vestiaire Collective on authenticated luxury resale. Inditex launched Zara Pre-Owned in the UK in November 2022, expanding into the resale, repair and donation of Zara garments. The platform now operates in 16 European markets and the US.“Secondhand is becoming a much more natural part of the way customers shop,” H&M CEO Daniel Erver said in an interview, calling Sellpy “our way of staying close to that shift.” Sellpy is not currently profitable because it’s in expansion mode, but “we believe the underlying business model has every prerequisite to be profitable while continuing to grow,” he said.Back in Vilnius, Plantenga believes Vinted has helped put Lithuania on the world corporate map. When he “stumbled into” his CEO role almost by accident, little did he know that he would helm something of an industry disruptor, he said.He was then based in New York scaling a mobile marketplace startup alongside venture capital firm FJ Labs. He had helped build the startup, sold it off and was somewhat free, skating and enjoying life in the Big Apple. That’s when Vinted executives reached out, seeking his counsel.“I wanted to help,” Plantenga said. “We knew that it was very risky and could go badly wrong.”Less than a decade on, Vinted had become Lithuania’s first technology unicorn — a startup valued at more than $1 billion — and sparked an ambition to become something a lot more significant. The company’s headquarters sit directly across the street from Nord Security, the cybersecurity firm behind NordVPN and itself a unicorn. Another neighborhood company, Oxylabs, a web data collection platform, became Lithuania’s second-biggest unicorn after Vinted this month, valued at $3.6 billion. The local bus stop serving the companies is named “Vienaragių” or “Unicorn.”Plantenga laments that Europe has created only one mega company over the last 30 years — Spotify, which is roughly valued at $100 billion — while the US has built multiple trillion-dollar businesses.Vinted’s current valuation “feels tiny and insignificant, and it feels as a solid stepping ground to build something that is bigger, much bigger,” he said. “Not aiming for that is an incredible waste.”
Tags :FashionLuxuryBusiness
