In the global digital economy, the platforms that structure mass usage are, for the most part, American or Chinese. Online commerce remains dominated by Amazon, eBay, Alibaba or Temu, that is to say by groups which already control product discovery, payment, logistics or customer relations on a very large scale. Amazon generated more than $716 billion in turnover in 2025, while Alibaba continues to operate on a scale of transactions that runs into the hundreds of billions, or even beyond a trillion dollars depending on the scope chosen.
Europe has given rise to few consumer platforms of this magnitude. Adyen has built a payments champion. Spotify has established itself in streaming. But European companies capable of organizing massive, recurring and cross-border transactional use remain rare. This is what makes the Vinted case particularly interesting.
Founded in 2008 in Vilnius, Vinted is no longer a simple clothing resale application. The group currently operates in 22 markets, achieved 813.4 million euros in turnover in 2024, generated 76.7 million euros in net profit, and recorded a GMV of 10 billion euros according to indications given by its CEO, Thomas Plantenga for the 2025 financial year, figures which should be revealed in the coming days. The Financial Times also revealed at the end of last year that the company was studying a new sale of securities which could value it at around 8 billion euros, after a transaction worth 5 billion euros in 2024 led in particular by TPG and Baillie Gifford.
The real question is therefore no longer whether Vinted is a great European scale-up, but whether the company is becoming the first European platform capable of competing, on its own territory, with the American digital commerce giants?
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The real subject: resale becomes an infrastructure
Second-hand goods have long been treated as a peripheral economy. It involved fragmented, poorly equipped circuits, with a lot of friction, whether through classified ads, flea markets, specialized forums, or even local exchanges. In recent years, the framework has changed, with inflation, the deterioration of the quality-price ratio in certain categories, the rise in environmental sensitivity and the commoditization of mobile uses have transformed resale into a structured market.
The next step for Vinted is not only to grow second hand, but to build the rails of C2C commerce, that is to say the infrastructures which allow individuals to exchange as simply as in B2C.
From this perspective, Vinted no longer sees itself as a resale site, but as a transactional layer capable of organizing the circulation of goods already produced. This is also what explains why the company is now investing beyond just the marketplace. Past growth serves as a foundation for expanding shipping, payment and new category capabilities. To illustrate this logic, the launch of Vinted Ventures, announced in April 2025, with tickets from 0.5 to 10 million euros for series A to C companies linked to the re-commerce economy.
A machine designed to create liquidity
The key concept to understand Vinted is not just second hand, it is liquidity.
In a peer-to-peer marketplace, value depends on the probability that an unused item will quickly find a buyer. The higher this probability, the more users are incentivized to post, which strengthens the offer and attracts more buyers. The dynamics of a C2C platform therefore rest on its ability to reduce the friction that prevents this circulation.
Vinted’s entire model aims precisely at this objective. No fees for sellers lowers the cost of entry and encourages posting. The resulting depth of offer increases the chances of finding a buyer. Integrated payment, transaction protection and standardized logistics solutions then secure the exchange and facilitate repeat transactions.
This mechanism is starting to produce scale effects that are still rare in the European C2C economy. Even in its most mature markets, the platform continues to record double-digit growth in the number of ads per capita, a sign that usage has not yet reached its ceiling. In newer markets, growth remains even faster.
At the same time, the company is gradually expanding its scope. After fashion, Vinted opened the electronics category in 2024 and continues to extend its offering to books, toys and video games. The platform also continues its geographic expansion, with the opening of new markets such as Croatia, Greece and Ireland, bringing its presence to 22 countries in Europe.
Europe first, United States second
Another strategic signal appears with Vinted’s first initiatives towards the United States. Still according to the Financial Times, the platform has launched a test linking London and New York to allow users from the two cities to buy and sell between them. The experiment remains limited, but it marks a first attempt at projection outside the European scope.
The American second-hand market indeed presents a paradox: it is vast, but remains relatively fragmented. Several platforms are present there, without any having managed to impose a dominant standard comparable to that which Vinted has gradually built in Europe.
If it is not yet a large-scale expansion to the United States, the company is rather in test mode to verify the exportability of the model. Few European platforms reach a sufficient level of maturity to consider this type of experimentation, with an installed user base, profitable activity and an annual transaction volume exceeding 10 billion euros.
A rare ambition for a European platform
If Vinted is not Amazon, and does not seek to become one. Its terrain is potentially just as structuring: organizing the circulation of goods already produced, and making this circulation a reflex of consumption.
If the company succeeds, it will not only demonstrate that a company born in Vilnius can reach several billion valuations, but that a European platform can still build, on a global segment, a consumer transactional infrastructure capable of imposing its own standards of payment, logistics, trust and use.
In this sense, Vinted is no longer just a second-hand marketplace. This is perhaps the first credible European attempt to build a C2C commerce utility. And this is precisely why his journey now deserves to be read not as another success story, but as a strategic case.
The founders behind Vinted
At the origin of Vinted are two Lithuanian entrepreneurs, Milda MitkutÄ— and Justas Janauskas. The idea was born in 2008 from a very concrete problem: how to easily get rid of clothes that have become useless. Milda MitkutÄ—, then faced with a wardrobe that was too full during a move, imagined a platform allowing these clothes to be sold to other users. Developer Justas Janauskas builds the first site to make this idea a reality.
Over the years, the company attracted other key profiles. Among them is Mantas Mikuckas, who joined the adventure very early and plays an important role in the operational structuring of the group. Together, they are laying the foundations for a platform that is quickly expanding beyond the Lithuanian market to the whole of Europe.
The company then changed scale with the arrival of Thomas Plantenga, a former marketplace ecosystem executive, who took over the management of the group in 2016 and piloted the strategic recovery of the platform before its international expansion phase.
When Vinted only had a few months left…
Vinted’s situation in the mid-2010s is far from the image of a thriving platform that it projects today. At the time, the company had less than a year of cash flow and was seeing its user base contract. The platform suffers from a deeper problem: its value proposition appears less attractive than that of several competitors. Sellers pay more, while the shopping experience remains less seamless and less secure.
Recovery then requires an overhaul of the platform economy. The structuring decision consists of removing fees for sellers and shifting monetization to buyers, via a system of transaction protection, logistics services and secure payment. The reasoning is that the added value of the platform (payment security, escrow management, simplified logistics) first benefits the buyer, who can therefore finance the cost.
This model change was first tested. Early A/B testing shows that lowering the cost of entry for sellers triggers a rapid increase in supply and transactions. The elasticity of demand gradually validates the hypothesis. Thus, by reducing supply-side frictions, the marketplace increases its liquidity and attracts more buyers. Once these results are confirmed, the model is rolled out more widely, supported by marketing campaigns that accelerate user acquisition.
A few years later, the effects appear clearly in the accounts. Vinted reaches profitability in 2023 with 596.3 million euros in turnover and 17.8 million euros in net profit. The trajectory then accelerates: in 2024, revenues increase by 36% to reach 813.4 million euros, while net profit climbs to 76.7 million euros and adjusted EBITDA exceeds 158 million euros.
