VINTED : The first European platform capable of competing with American giants?

In the global digital economy, the platforms that structure mass consumer behavior are, for the most part, American or Chinese. Online commerce remains dominated by Amazon, eBay, Alibaba or Temu — groups that already control product discovery, payments, logistics and customer relationships at massive scale. Amazon generated more than $716 billion in revenue in 2025, while Alibaba continues to operate at transaction volumes measured in the hundreds of billions, and in some cases above the trillion-dollar mark depending on the scope considered.

Europe, by contrast, has produced relatively few consumer platforms of this magnitude. Adyen has built a payments champion. Spotify established itself in streaming. But European companies capable of organizing large-scale, recurring and cross-border transactional usage remain rare. This is precisely what makes the case of Vinted particularly interesting.

Founded in 2008 in Vilnius, Vinted is no longer simply an app for reselling clothes. The group now operates across 22 markets, generated €813.4 million in revenue in 2024, posted €76.7 million in net profit, and recorded a gross merchandise value (GMV) of €10 billion according to figures provided by its CEO, Thomas Plantenga, for fiscal year 2025, numbers expected to be formally released in the coming days. The Financial Times also revealed late last year that the company was exploring a new secondary share sale that could value the business at around €8 billion, following a €5 billion transaction in 2024 involving investors such as TPG and Baillie Gifford.

The real question, therefore, is no longer whether Vinted is an impressive European scale-up, but whether the company is becoming the first European platform capable of competing, on its own terrain, with American giants in digital commerce.

The real issue: resale becomes infrastructure

For a long time, second-hand commerce was treated as a peripheral economy. It operated through fragmented channels, poorly equipped and friction-heavy, whether through classified ads, flea markets, niche forums or local exchanges. Over the past few years, the context has shifted. Inflation, the deterioration of price-quality ratios in certain product categories, rising environmental awareness and the normalization of mobile usage have transformed resale into a structured market.

The next stage for Vinted is not simply to grow second-hand commerce, but to build the rails of C2C commerce, the infrastructure that allows individuals to trade as easily as businesses do in B2C environments.

From this perspective, Vinted no longer sees itself as a resale website but as a transactional layer capable of organizing the circulation of already-produced goods. This also explains why the company is now investing beyond the marketplace itself. Past growth serves as a foundation for expanding capabilities in shipping, payments and new product categories. One illustration of this strategy is the launch of Vinted Ventures in April 2025, deploying tickets ranging from €500,000 to €10 million into Series A to C companies connected to the re-commerce economy.

A machine designed to create liquidity

The key concept for understanding Vinted is not only second-hand commerce, 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 list items, which strengthens supply and attracts more buyers. The dynamics of a C2C platform therefore depend on its ability to reduce the frictions that prevent this circulation.

Vinted’s entire model is built around precisely this objective. The absence of seller fees lowers the barrier to entry and encourages listings. The resulting depth of supply increases the chances of finding a buyer. Integrated payments, transaction protection and standardized logistics solutions then secure the exchange and facilitate repeat transactions.

This mechanism is beginning to produce scale effects that remain rare in the European C2C economy. Even in its most mature markets, the platform continues to record double-digit growth in the number of listings per capita, suggesting that adoption has not yet reached its ceiling. In newer markets, growth is even faster.

At the same time, the company is gradually expanding its scope. After fashion, Vinted opened its electronics category in 2024 and continues to broaden its offering to include books, toys and video games. The platform is also continuing its geographic expansion, launching in new markets such as Croatia, Greece and Ireland, bringing its presence to 22 countries across Europe.

Europe first, the United States next

Another strategic signal appears in Vinted’s first initiatives toward the United States. According to the Financial Times, the platform has launched a test linking London and New York, allowing users in the two cities to buy and sell from one another. The experiment remains limited, but it marks a first attempt to project the platform beyond the European perimeter.

The U.S. second-hand market presents an interesting paradox: it is vast but relatively fragmented. Several platforms operate there, yet none has managed to impose a dominant standard comparable to the one Vinted has progressively built in Europe.

This is not yet a full-scale expansion into the United States. The company is still in testing mode, evaluating whether its model can travel. Few European platforms reach a level of maturity that allows them to conduct this type of experiment, with an established user base, profitable operations and annual transaction volumes exceeding €10 billion.

A rare European platform ambition

Vinted is not Amazon, nor is it trying to become one. Its terrain, however, may be just as structurally important: organizing the circulation of already-produced goods and turning that circulation into a consumer reflex.

If the company succeeds, it will not simply demonstrate that a business born in Vilnius can reach multi-billion-euro valuations. It will show that a European platform can still build, within a global market segment, a consumer-scale transactional infrastructure capable of imposing its own standards in payments, logistics, trust and usage.

In that sense, Vinted is no longer merely a second-hand marketplace. It may represent the first credible European attempt to build a utility layer for C2C commerce. That is precisely why its trajectory deserves to be read not simply as another startup success story, but as a strategic case study.

The founders behind Vinted

At the origin of Vinted are two Lithuanian entrepreneurs, Milda Mitkutė and Justas Janauskas. The idea emerged in 2008 from a very concrete problem: how to easily get rid of clothes that had become unused. While moving house and facing an overflowing wardrobe, Milda Mitkutė imagined a platform where these clothes could be sold to other users. Justas Janauskas, a developer, built the first website to bring the idea to life.

Over the years, the company attracted other key profiles. Among them is Mantas Mikuckas, who joined the adventure very early and played an important role in structuring the group’s operations. Together, they laid the foundations for a platform that quickly expanded beyond the Lithuanian market to the rest of Europe.

The company later changed scale with the arrival of Thomas Plantenga, a former marketplace executive who took over leadership of the group in 2016 and led the platform’s strategic turnaround before its phase of international expansion.

When Vinted had only a few months left…

Vinted’s situation in the mid-2010s was far from the image of a thriving platform it projects today. At the time, the company had less than a year of cash runway and was seeing its user base shrink. The platform suffered from a deeper issue: its value proposition appeared less attractive than that of several competitors. Sellers paid higher fees, while the purchasing experience remained less fluid and less secure.

The turnaround required a fundamental rethink of the platform’s economics. The decisive move was to remove seller fees and shift monetization toward buyers through a system of transaction protection, logistics services and secure payments. The reasoning was that the platform’s added value, payment security, escrow management and simplified logistics, primarily benefits the buyer, who can therefore finance the service.

This change in model was first tested. Early A/B tests showed that lowering the entry cost for sellers triggered a rapid increase in supply and transactions. Demand elasticity gradually validated the hypothesis. By reducing friction on the supply side, the marketplace increased its liquidity and attracted more buyers. Once confirmed, the model was rolled out more broadly and supported by marketing campaigns that accelerated user acquisition.

A few years later, the effects became visible in the accounts. Vinted reached profitability in 2023 with €596.3 million in revenue and €17.8 million in net profit. The trajectory then accelerated: in 2024, revenue grew by 36% to reach €813.4 million, while net profit climbed to €76.7 million and adjusted EBITDA exceeded €158 million.