Vinted sales soar to £1bn amid bargain hunting second-hand fashion boom
Resale platform Vinted has seen sales boom after expanding beyond second-hand clothes and into new markets.
The business said it made just under £1billion in sales last year – an increase of 38 per cent, as money-conscious consumers looked to buy used goods.
It credited the boost with an expansion into categories such as electronics and homeware, as well as expanding into more countries.
The total value of products sold on Vinted last year was £9.5billion – up 47 per cent from 2024.
But profit declined from £67million in 2024 to £54million, which the business said was a result of expanding into new categories and launching in new countries, including in Estonia and the US.
Vinted was founded in Lithuania in 2008 and has since grown into one of the world’s most popular fashion re-sale platforms.
Although Vinted is best known as a fashion marketplace, it is also an app where users can now sell electronic gadgets, bedding and pet accessories.
The company was founded in 2008 when Justas Janauskas offered to create a website to help his friend Milda Mitkute clear her wardrobe before she moved house.
It became Lithuania’s first unicorn in 2019 and is now backed by big names in venture capital such as Accel, Lightspeed and EQT. Rival Depop was recently bought by Ebay for £890million in the latest sign of consumer demand for second-hand items.
Vinted’s roaring success comes as online giants such as ASOS and Boohoo are falling out of fashion with younger customers.
Vinted chief executive Thomas Plantenga suggested the business could see an uptick in transactions should the Iran war pile pressure onto consumers.
There have been concerns over energy bills and food prices following volatile oil prices amid the conflict in the Middle East.
Plantenga told news agency Reuters: ‘What we do know is that Vinted is a very useful tool if people have less money and things become more expensive, to sell things and make some money and find good deals.
‘So it shouldn’t be an environment that is going to hurt us a lot.’
He also said the business is not considering a stock market listing in its short-term future.
The group was valued at £4.4billion in a share sale in October 2024.
But it was reported to be exploring a secondary share sale that would value it closer to £7billion, according to a Financial Times story in November.
Jonathan De Mello, a retail analyst at JDM Retail, said businesses like Vinted are ‘growing exponentially’ amid ‘squeezed middle-class wallets and a growing collective guilt over the mountain of polyester we’ve accumulated.’
He said: ‘Today, the real theatre of commerce happens under the duvet, soundtracked by the persistent ping of the Vinted app. We have become a nation of digital rag-and-bone men, obsessively haggling over a £4 Zara blouse as if it were a Ming vase.
‘There is a certain tragicomedy in the way we live now – printing out shipping labels at the local corner shop just to offload the impulse buys of yesteryear.’
Retail analyst Richard Hyman also said the boom was a ‘one-way ticket’.
‘The second hand market could never be cool because it was “second hand”, and then some genius decided to change its name to “pre-loved”. That gave permission for people to actually celebrate and advertise the fact they had bought something that had been previously worn by somebody else,’ he added.
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