Milda Mitkute and a friend set up a website to clear out her closet. It soon grew exponentially. Now Vinted has tens of millions of users around the world and is the first Lithuanian ‘unicorn’ (tech speak for a private startup with a valuation of at least $1bn).
In 2008, Milda Mitkute and Justas Janauskas co-founded Vinted in Vilnius, Lithuania, testing a prototype website where Lithuanian women could trade their clothes.
After recruiting a couch surfing guest to help with advertising and promotions, the two expanded their business into Germany. In 2010, Vinted launched in the United States. In 2012, Vinted partnered with Lemon Labs, a Lithuanian-based app development consultancy to launch their mobile app - and that's when the business really started to take off.
Vinted provides users a platform to sell their clothing and accessories, purchase or swap from other users, and communicate with members using the forums. As of December 2023, Vinted is available in twenty-one countries and has more than 65 million registered users.
Vinted charges buyers a service fee on each purchase. They also charge sellers a fee every time they "bump" their listings to the top of the catalog. Sellers can also choose, for a fee, to spotlight their wardrobe so that their full offerings appear in a horizontal scroll across the feed of certain buyers.
“The genius of it is the delivery,” says Melanie Monchar, a 52-year-old admin worker from Somerset, England, who sells clothes on the app. “That’s why I switched from eBay to Vinted. Because when you have to buy postage and work it all out, it’s a headache,” she told The Guardian.
Vinted generates an in-app postage label, which can be used to drop off or collect items from newsagents or lockers. Plus, unlike eBay, there are no seller fees and no fiddly categories to fill in before you can list an item. Because there’s a ban on photos from store websites of the clothing being modelled, you feel like what you are buying is more authentic. Melanie Moncharis one of 16 million Brits (nearly a quarter of the population!) who use Vinted.
“Our mission is to make secondhand the first choice globally,” says Vinted’s CEO, Adam Jay. Although Vinted launched in the UK in 2014, the platform only really started to generate traction in 2021. It was “classic pandemic behaviour to clean out your wardrobes,” says Jay. By 2022, Vinted was being used by 8 million Britons. The following year, that doubled.
For consumers such as Monchar, buying new clothes seems increasingly ethically indefensible in a world overflowing with stuff. Research commissioned by Vinted shows that 39 percent of transactions on the platform prevented the purchase of a new item.
According to the recent report, buying second-hand fashion on Vinted instead of new demonstrated an average emissions saving of 1.8 kg of CO2 per item. This means that the net carbon emissions avoided by the Vinted Marketplace in 2021 was 453 kilotonnes of CO2 - the equivalent emissions of flying between London and Los Angeles and back approximately 275,000 times. This, says Vinted, shows that buying second-hand fashion is less damaging to the climate than buying new items.