Welcome to the third part of a trilogy on how to build a second-hand marketplace like Vinted.
In the first two parts, we focused on how the platform works. We looked at the technology choices that helped Vinted scale. We also examined the business model decisions that formed how buyers, sellers, and the platform interacted over time. Those articles explained the mechanics. In this one, we will look at the direction.
Between 2008 and 2026, Vinted did not follow a linear plan. Instead, the company moved through several strategic phases.
Vinted's journey shows why liquidity must come before monetization. It explains why control only works after trust exists. It also shows why marketplaces fail when they try to optimize systems they do not yet understand.
This is exactly what we are going to explore in this article.
Early Decisions (2008–2013)
In the first two parts, we focused on how the platform works. We looked at the technology choices that helped Vinted scale. We also examined the business model decisions that formed how buyers, sellers, and the platform interacted over time. Those articles explained the mechanics. In this one, we will look at the direction.
Between 2008 and 2026, Vinted did not follow a linear plan. Instead, the company moved through several strategic phases.
Vinted's journey shows why liquidity must come before monetization. It explains why control only works after trust exists. It also shows why marketplaces fail when they try to optimize systems they do not yet understand.
This is exactly what we are going to explore in this article.
Early Decisions (2008–2013)
As we already mentioned in previous article, Vinted did not begin with a plan to dominate Europe. The company started with a small, personal problem that felt familiar to many people: one person trying to clear out her wardrobe.
In 2008, Vinted launched in Vilnius as a simple website for swapping and selling second-hand clothes. The audience was narrow by design. The platform focused on local women interested in fashion and reuse. Founder Milda Mitkutė later described that moment:
“The idea was born spontaneously at a party… we said ‘let’s try, if it won’t work, it’s still fun.”
That attitude shaped the first years of the company. Vinted did not optimize for growth. It optimized for belonging. Users were not framed as supply and demand. They were members of a shared space with clear social norms. Second-hand fashion was the focus. Prices were informal and Communication was direct.
The first real strategic test arrived in 2009, when Vinted expanded to Germany under the name Kleiderkreisel. The founders wanted to know whether the same community logic would survive outside Lithuania.
It did.
Mitkutė later said:
“Before this we thought of ourselves as local, but with our German launch our mindset changed – we started to see ourselves as a potential global player.”
Between 2010 and 2013, Vinted entered additional European markets, including the Czech Republic. The same pattern began to repeat across countries. Fashion proved to be a universal second-hand category. Community norms transferred better than expected. Word-of-mouth growth followed wherever listing items and messaging other users felt easy and natural.
However, at the same time, several things were still missing.
There was no clear monetization model. The platform did not control payments or shipping. Users often handled payments and delivery outside the platform. From a revenue point of view, this was inefficient. From a growth point of view, it was the right trade-off.
At this stage, Vinted behaved more like a social network with transactions attached than a marketplace with infrastructure. The platform focused on keeping interactions simple and familiar, even if that meant giving up control.
By 2013, this came to fruition. Vinted had proven product–market fit in several countries and attracted serious investor attention. The company raised a €6 million Series A from Accel in 2013, followed by a €24.8 million round in early 2014 from Accel and Insight Ventures.
The strategic lesson from 2008 to 2013 is simple and often ignored. Vinted did not earn the right to expand by having a business model. The company earned that right by proving that a specific group of users would repeatedly trade with each other in a shared and trusted environment.
By 2014, Vinted looked like a European success story. The platform had expanded into France, Poland, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It had raised close to €31 million in venture capital. The user base passed 10 million registered members. From the outside, the strategy appeared to be working.
Inside the company, the picture was very different.
This was the moment when growth began to work against the business rather than for it. The problem was not a lack of demand. The problem was growth without structure.
Vinted expanded faster than it could standardize operations, align teams, or build a single economic engine. Each new country added complexity instead of leverage. The platform operated under different brands, including Kleiderkreisel, Mamikreisel, and Vinted. Teams were spread across offices in London, Munich, Paris, and San Francisco. User behavior around payments and shipping varied by market, with little consistency.
Instead of one marketplace becoming stronger with scale, Vinted was running several loosely connected communities. Each required management attention, marketing spend, and local support. All of them consumed cash.
At the same time, monetization arrived at the worst possible moment. In an effort to generate revenue, Vinted introduced a mandatory sales commission for sellers. On a spreadsheet, the decision made sense. The platform had millions of users and growing traffic. Charging sellers looked like a reasonable way to capture value.
In practice, the impact was damaging.
Seller fees reduced supply at the margin. Casual users, who listed low-value items from their own wardrobes, began to hesitate. Some left the platform. Others moved transactions off-platform to avoid fees. Liquidity weakened, which hurt buyers first and sellers soon after. Growth slowed, even as operating costs continued to rise.
Inside the company, the situation became hard to ignore. One former insider later described the period without exaggeration:
“The business was completely burning down.”
By 2015, Vinted employed around 240 people and operated several international offices. Despite this footprint, the platform still lacked sustainable unit economics. Users were present, but too few transactions passed through systems Vinted actually controlled. Payments and shipping were often handled outside the platform, which meant complexity increased without a matching increase in revenue.
This period exposed a central strategic mistake. Vinted expanded across countries before it controlled the transaction.
Without escrow payments, integrated shipping, or strong buyer guarantees, the company could not enforce trust or monetize activity in a reliable way. Introducing seller fees under these conditions punished the side of the market responsible for creating inventory. Liquidity fell faster as a result.
By early 2016, the situation turned existential. Investors reportedly wrote Vinted’s valuation down to zero. The company was no longer discussing optimization or growth strategy. It was trying to survive.
The lesson from 2014 to 2016 is uncomfortable but essential for anyone building a marketplace. Expansion does not strengthen a weak model.
The first move was direct and unsentimental. Vinted cut the organization down to what still worked.Within a few months, the company closed offices in San Francisco, London, Munich, and Paris.
Headcount dropped from roughly 240 employees to about 150. Several weaker or unfocused markets were exited or deprioritized so the company could concentrate on France and Germany.
France and Germany were the only markets where Vinted still showed strong community engagement and repeat transaction behavior. Everything else consumed time and capital without reinforcing the core.The second move was more controversial and far more important.
Inside Vinted, however, the diagnosis was clear. The platform was not demand-constrained. It was supply-constrained. Casual sellers listing low-value items were the engine of liquidity, and seller fees were slowing that engine down.
Removing seller fees changed behavior almost immediately. Listing items became frictionless. Users could upload dozens of products without worrying about losing money. Supply increased sharply. As listings grew, buyers returned. As buyers returned, sellers became more active. Transactions that had moved off-platform began to come back.
Over time, this single decision led to more than one billion cumulative listings and established Vinted as the largest second-hand inventory pool in Europe.
In exchange, buyers received concrete value. Payments were held in escrow. Refunds were guaranteed if items failed to arrive or did not match their description. Disputes followed a clear and structured process.The fee was not framed as a platform tax. It was framed as insurance. That distinction mattered. Buyers are more willing to pay for safety than sellers are to pay for access. The pricing model aligned with user behavior instead of fighting it.
At the same time, Vinted introduced optional seller-side paid features, such as promoted listings and visibility boosts. Monetization became additive rather than extractive. Sellers paid for advantages, not for the right to participate.
The result was a structure that preserved seller motivation, monetized every completed transaction, and scaled naturally with GMV.
The company put resources into content moderation, fraud detection, customer support, and clearer transaction flows inside the app. These changes were not visible in marketing materials, but users felt them in daily use.
Plantenga later described the mindset simply:
“We spend more time analysing our failures than acknowledging things that go well.”
That focus rebuilt confidence on both sides of the marketplace. Buyers trusted the platform enough to transact with strangers. Sellers trusted that disputes would be handled consistently. Trust translated into higher conversion rates and more repeat usage.
Growth rebounded after a period of stagnation. Investor confidence returned after the company had previously been written down to zero.
The reset proved a point that many marketplace builders learn too late. Marketplaces do not fail because they lack growth. They fail because incentives, trust, and economics drift out of alignment.
In 2016, Vinted rebuilt that alignment from first principles. Everything that followed — renewed expansion, vertical integration, and sustained profitability — rests on that moment.
At a certain scale, Vinted stopped behaving like a neutral intermediary. It made a deliberate decision that most marketplaces avoid because it is expensive, complex, and risky: it began to own the most painful parts of the transaction.
This is the point where Vinted ceased to be “just a marketplace” and started becoming an infrastructure company for second-hand commerce.
Why Logistics Is Not a Feature
For years, shipping was treated as a necessary evil. Users printed labels elsewhere, queued at post offices, negotiated costs in chat. From a product perspective, this friction was tolerable at small scale. At tens of millions of users, it became existential.
Shipping determines:
In other words, logistics directly controls conversion, trust, and unit economics. Treating it as a “feature” delegated to third parties means delegating control over the most failure-prone step in the journey.
Vinted’s leadership recognized that if shipping remained fragmented, the platform would remain fragile. Owning the transaction meant owning the movement of goods.
In 2022, Vinted launched Vinted Go, its dedicated logistics arm. This was not about buying trucks or warehouses. It was about owning the integration layer between users and carriers.
Vinted Go focused on:
By 2023, Vinted Go operated thousands of PUDO points and lockers across France, Benelux, and other core markets. In France alone, the network exceeded 7,000 locations. This mattered for three reasons.
First, cost. Out-of-home delivery is cheaper and easier to consolidate. Lower shipping prices increased checkout conversion, especially for low-value items — the core of Vinted’s GMV.
Second, trust. Tracking, delivery confirmation, and dispute resolution were now tied to Vinted’s systems. Shipping stopped being opaque. That reduced fraud and customer support load.
Third, margins. By negotiating carrier rates at scale and applying small markups, shipping shifted from a pass-through cost to a revenue contributor.
Vinted reinforced this strategy in 2023 by acquiring Homerr, a Dutch C2C parcel network, deepening its last-mile expertise. Logistics was no longer outsourced risk. It became a controlled growth lever.
In 2023, Vinted launched Vinted Pay, its in-house payments entity, after obtaining an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license. This allowed Vinted to operate wallets, escrow accounts, and payouts internally.
The strategic importance of this move is often underestimated. As a result, with Vinted Pay:
This keeps liquidity inside the platform and increases GMV velocity. From a cost perspective, internalizing payments also turns a former cost center into a margin opportunity. As analysts have noted, payment processing businesses often operate with 60–90% gross margins at scale.
Vinted itself said:
“By developing our own in-house capabilities, we aim to be faster and more responsive as we grow.”
Most marketplaces try to avoid logistics and payments because they are “messy.” Vinted embraced them for the same reason.
These moves directly contributed to Vinted’s financial outcomes:
The strategic insight is simple but rare: when a marketplace controls trust-critical infrastructure, growth becomes more predictable, margins improve, and expansion stops being fragile.
By 2025, Vinted was in a very different place than it had been a decade earlier. The company was no longer trying to stay alive, and it was no longer proving that it could win Europe. That work was already done. What mattered now was whether the platform could keep working as it got larger, more complex, and harder to control.
At this size, growth stopped being the hard part. Control became the problem.
Earlier in its history, Vinted could afford to move fast and accept rough edges. If something broke in one market, the damage stayed local. By 2025, that was no longer true. Every decision now affected logistics networks, payment flows, compliance rules, and user trust across dozens of countries. A mistake in one place could ripple everywhere.
That reality formed how Vinted approached its next phase.
The current attempt, starting in 2025, is built on a very different mindset.
This time, Vinted did not rush to plant a flag. Instead of opening the entire market at once, the company started with narrow, controlled pilots. Early activity connected buyers in New York with sellers in London. That choice sounds modest, but it solved several problems at once.
It allowed Vinted to test real demand without splitting liquidity across too many locations. It exposed shipping times and delivery failures under real conditions.
Fashion still anchors the platform, but by 2026 the marketplace has grown steadily into home goods, electronics, books, and other lifestyle categories. We explore second-hand platform 2026 trends in our previous article.
Luxury resale has become more structured through acquisitions such as Rebelle and through internal verification services that reduce risk for higher-value transactions.
None of this is accidental. Each new category runs on the same payments, logistics, and trust infrastructure. The goal is not to chase new users at all costs, but to give existing users more reasons to transact within a system they already trust.
This logic also explains initiatives like Vinted Ventures. By investing in re-commerce startups, Vinted extends its reach beyond the core platform while pulling ideas, partners, and category insight back into the ecosystem.
What makes Vinted worth studying is not that it got everything right. It is that it survived long enough to see what actually mattered.
The company did not win because it had a better vision than others. For many years, it barely had one. What it learned instead was how sensitive marketplaces are to order. Liquidity came first. Monetization came later.
The clearest lesson is that liquidity beats monetization early on. When Vinted removed seller fees in 2016, it accepted short-term pain to fix a deeper problem. A marketplace with perfect pricing and weak liquidity simply does not function.
Escrow payments, buyer protection, shipping control, moderation, and dispute handling were not cosmetic improvements. They changed user behavior. People bought more often, returned more often, and stopped moving transactions elsewhere. Logistics and payments became assets only after scale existed. Before that point, they would have been liabilities. Timing mattered more than ambition.
In the end, Vinted did not win by being smarter at every step. It won by being disciplined enough to change direction when reality disagreed. For marketplace founders, that may be the most practical lesson of all.
In 2008, Vinted launched in Vilnius as a simple website for swapping and selling second-hand clothes. The audience was narrow by design. The platform focused on local women interested in fashion and reuse. Founder Milda Mitkutė later described that moment:
“The idea was born spontaneously at a party… we said ‘let’s try, if it won’t work, it’s still fun.”
That attitude shaped the first years of the company. Vinted did not optimize for growth. It optimized for belonging. Users were not framed as supply and demand. They were members of a shared space with clear social norms. Second-hand fashion was the focus. Prices were informal and Communication was direct.
The first real strategic test arrived in 2009, when Vinted expanded to Germany under the name Kleiderkreisel. The founders wanted to know whether the same community logic would survive outside Lithuania.
It did.
Mitkutė later said:
“Before this we thought of ourselves as local, but with our German launch our mindset changed – we started to see ourselves as a potential global player.”
Between 2010 and 2013, Vinted entered additional European markets, including the Czech Republic. The same pattern began to repeat across countries. Fashion proved to be a universal second-hand category. Community norms transferred better than expected. Word-of-mouth growth followed wherever listing items and messaging other users felt easy and natural.
However, at the same time, several things were still missing.
There was no clear monetization model. The platform did not control payments or shipping. Users often handled payments and delivery outside the platform. From a revenue point of view, this was inefficient. From a growth point of view, it was the right trade-off.
At this stage, Vinted behaved more like a social network with transactions attached than a marketplace with infrastructure. The platform focused on keeping interactions simple and familiar, even if that meant giving up control.
By 2013, this came to fruition. Vinted had proven product–market fit in several countries and attracted serious investor attention. The company raised a €6 million Series A from Accel in 2013, followed by a €24.8 million round in early 2014 from Accel and Insight Ventures.
The strategic lesson from 2008 to 2013 is simple and often ignored. Vinted did not earn the right to expand by having a business model. The company earned that right by proving that a specific group of users would repeatedly trade with each other in a shared and trusted environment.
When Expansion Becomes the Enemy (2014–2016)
By 2014, Vinted looked like a European success story. The platform had expanded into France, Poland, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It had raised close to €31 million in venture capital. The user base passed 10 million registered members. From the outside, the strategy appeared to be working.
Inside the company, the picture was very different.
This was the moment when growth began to work against the business rather than for it. The problem was not a lack of demand. The problem was growth without structure.
Vinted expanded faster than it could standardize operations, align teams, or build a single economic engine. Each new country added complexity instead of leverage. The platform operated under different brands, including Kleiderkreisel, Mamikreisel, and Vinted. Teams were spread across offices in London, Munich, Paris, and San Francisco. User behavior around payments and shipping varied by market, with little consistency.
Instead of one marketplace becoming stronger with scale, Vinted was running several loosely connected communities. Each required management attention, marketing spend, and local support. All of them consumed cash.
At the same time, monetization arrived at the worst possible moment. In an effort to generate revenue, Vinted introduced a mandatory sales commission for sellers. On a spreadsheet, the decision made sense. The platform had millions of users and growing traffic. Charging sellers looked like a reasonable way to capture value.
In practice, the impact was damaging.
Seller fees reduced supply at the margin. Casual users, who listed low-value items from their own wardrobes, began to hesitate. Some left the platform. Others moved transactions off-platform to avoid fees. Liquidity weakened, which hurt buyers first and sellers soon after. Growth slowed, even as operating costs continued to rise.
Inside the company, the situation became hard to ignore. One former insider later described the period without exaggeration:
“The business was completely burning down.”
By 2015, Vinted employed around 240 people and operated several international offices. Despite this footprint, the platform still lacked sustainable unit economics. Users were present, but too few transactions passed through systems Vinted actually controlled. Payments and shipping were often handled outside the platform, which meant complexity increased without a matching increase in revenue.
This period exposed a central strategic mistake. Vinted expanded across countries before it controlled the transaction.
Without escrow payments, integrated shipping, or strong buyer guarantees, the company could not enforce trust or monetize activity in a reliable way. Introducing seller fees under these conditions punished the side of the market responsible for creating inventory. Liquidity fell faster as a result.
By early 2016, the situation turned existential. Investors reportedly wrote Vinted’s valuation down to zero. The company was no longer discussing optimization or growth strategy. It was trying to survive.
The lesson from 2014 to 2016 is uncomfortable but essential for anyone building a marketplace. Expansion does not strengthen a weak model.
The Big Reset in 2016
In 2016, Vinted stopped trying to grow and started trying to survive. At the center of the turnaround was , who entered the company through Insight Partners, first as a consultant and shortly after as chief executive. His task was not to fine-tune the existing strategy. It was to fix what was structurally broken. The first move was direct and unsentimental. Vinted cut the organization down to what still worked.Within a few months, the company closed offices in San Francisco, London, Munich, and Paris.
Headcount dropped from roughly 240 employees to about 150. Several weaker or unfocused markets were exited or deprioritized so the company could concentrate on France and Germany.
France and Germany were the only markets where Vinted still showed strong community engagement and repeat transaction behavior. Everything else consumed time and capital without reinforcing the core.The second move was more controversial and far more important.
Making Selling Free Again
In 2016, Vinted removed mandatory seller fees.For a venture-backed marketplace under financial pressure, the decision looked reckless. Revenue was already fragile. Cutting a direct income stream appeared to move the company in the wrong direction.Inside Vinted, however, the diagnosis was clear. The platform was not demand-constrained. It was supply-constrained. Casual sellers listing low-value items were the engine of liquidity, and seller fees were slowing that engine down.
Removing seller fees changed behavior almost immediately. Listing items became frictionless. Users could upload dozens of products without worrying about losing money. Supply increased sharply. As listings grew, buyers returned. As buyers returned, sellers became more active. Transactions that had moved off-platform began to come back.
Over time, this single decision led to more than one billion cumulative listings and established Vinted as the largest second-hand inventory pool in Europe.
Charge Buyers, Not Sellers
Removing seller fees forced a rethink of how monetization should work. Instead of taxing participation, Vinted introduced a buyer-paid protection fee. This fee typically ranged from 3 to 8 % of the item price + a fixed amount.In exchange, buyers received concrete value. Payments were held in escrow. Refunds were guaranteed if items failed to arrive or did not match their description. Disputes followed a clear and structured process.The fee was not framed as a platform tax. It was framed as insurance. That distinction mattered. Buyers are more willing to pay for safety than sellers are to pay for access. The pricing model aligned with user behavior instead of fighting it.
At the same time, Vinted introduced optional seller-side paid features, such as promoted listings and visibility boosts. Monetization became additive rather than extractive. Sellers paid for advantages, not for the right to participate.
The result was a structure that preserved seller motivation, monetized every completed transaction, and scaled naturally with GMV.
Trust and Safety as Strategic Infrastructure
The reset also changed what Vinted prioritized internally. Expansion slowed. Feature development became secondary. Investment shifted toward operational foundations.The company put resources into content moderation, fraud detection, customer support, and clearer transaction flows inside the app. These changes were not visible in marketing materials, but users felt them in daily use.
Plantenga later described the mindset simply:
“We spend more time analysing our failures than acknowledging things that go well.”
That focus rebuilt confidence on both sides of the marketplace. Buyers trusted the platform enough to transact with strangers. Sellers trusted that disputes would be handled consistently. Trust translated into higher conversion rates and more repeat usage.
The Immediate Impact
The effect of the reset was fast and measurable.By 2017, just one year after the changes, users transacted roughly $360 million in GMV.Growth rebounded after a period of stagnation. Investor confidence returned after the company had previously been written down to zero.
The reset proved a point that many marketplace builders learn too late. Marketplaces do not fail because they lack growth. They fail because incentives, trust, and economics drift out of alignment.
In 2016, Vinted rebuilt that alignment from first principles. Everything that followed — renewed expansion, vertical integration, and sustained profitability — rests on that moment.
Transition to the Value Chain Ownership
At a certain scale, Vinted stopped behaving like a neutral intermediary. It made a deliberate decision that most marketplaces avoid because it is expensive, complex, and risky: it began to own the most painful parts of the transaction.
This is the point where Vinted ceased to be “just a marketplace” and started becoming an infrastructure company for second-hand commerce.
Why Logistics Is Not a Feature
For years, shipping was treated as a necessary evil. Users printed labels elsewhere, queued at post offices, negotiated costs in chat. From a product perspective, this friction was tolerable at small scale. At tens of millions of users, it became existential.
Shipping determines:
In other words, logistics directly controls conversion, trust, and unit economics. Treating it as a “feature” delegated to third parties means delegating control over the most failure-prone step in the journey.
Vinted’s leadership recognized that if shipping remained fragmented, the platform would remain fragile. Owning the transaction meant owning the movement of goods.
Vinted Go
In 2022, Vinted launched Vinted Go, its dedicated logistics arm. This was not about buying trucks or warehouses. It was about owning the integration layer between users and carriers.
Vinted Go focused on:
By 2023, Vinted Go operated thousands of PUDO points and lockers across France, Benelux, and other core markets. In France alone, the network exceeded 7,000 locations. This mattered for three reasons.
First, cost. Out-of-home delivery is cheaper and easier to consolidate. Lower shipping prices increased checkout conversion, especially for low-value items — the core of Vinted’s GMV.
Second, trust. Tracking, delivery confirmation, and dispute resolution were now tied to Vinted’s systems. Shipping stopped being opaque. That reduced fraud and customer support load.
Third, margins. By negotiating carrier rates at scale and applying small markups, shipping shifted from a pass-through cost to a revenue contributor.
Vinted reinforced this strategy in 2023 by acquiring Homerr, a Dutch C2C parcel network, deepening its last-mile expertise. Logistics was no longer outsourced risk. It became a controlled growth lever.
Payments Strategy
Payments followed the same logic. Initially, Vinted relied on third-party PSPs. This was fine at low volume. At scale, it meant:In 2023, Vinted launched Vinted Pay, its in-house payments entity, after obtaining an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license. This allowed Vinted to operate wallets, escrow accounts, and payouts internally.
The strategic importance of this move is often underestimated. As a result, with Vinted Pay:
This keeps liquidity inside the platform and increases GMV velocity. From a cost perspective, internalizing payments also turns a former cost center into a margin opportunity. As analysts have noted, payment processing businesses often operate with 60–90% gross margins at scale.
Vinted itself said:
“By developing our own in-house capabilities, we aim to be faster and more responsive as we grow.”
Most marketplaces try to avoid logistics and payments because they are “messy.” Vinted embraced them for the same reason.
These moves directly contributed to Vinted’s financial outcomes:
The strategic insight is simple but rare: when a marketplace controls trust-critical infrastructure, growth becomes more predictable, margins improve, and expansion stops being fragile.
The Current Strategy (2025–2026)
By 2025, Vinted was in a very different place than it had been a decade earlier. The company was no longer trying to stay alive, and it was no longer proving that it could win Europe. That work was already done. What mattered now was whether the platform could keep working as it got larger, more complex, and harder to control.
At this size, growth stopped being the hard part. Control became the problem.
Earlier in its history, Vinted could afford to move fast and accept rough edges. If something broke in one market, the damage stayed local. By 2025, that was no longer true. Every decision now affected logistics networks, payment flows, compliance rules, and user trust across dozens of countries. A mistake in one place could ripple everywhere.
That reality formed how Vinted approached its next phase.
Why the U.S. Looks Different This Time
Vinted had already learned the hard way that entering the United States is not a branding exercise. The first attempt, around 2013 and 2014, followed a familiar startup playbook. Launch the product, invest in marketing, and wait for liquidity to form. It never really did.The current attempt, starting in 2025, is built on a very different mindset.
This time, Vinted did not rush to plant a flag. Instead of opening the entire market at once, the company started with narrow, controlled pilots. Early activity connected buyers in New York with sellers in London. That choice sounds modest, but it solved several problems at once.
It allowed Vinted to test real demand without splitting liquidity across too many locations. It exposed shipping times and delivery failures under real conditions.
Growing What Exists
At the same time, Vinted continues to expand within its existing footprint.Fashion still anchors the platform, but by 2026 the marketplace has grown steadily into home goods, electronics, books, and other lifestyle categories. We explore second-hand platform 2026 trends in our previous article.
Luxury resale has become more structured through acquisitions such as Rebelle and through internal verification services that reduce risk for higher-value transactions.
None of this is accidental. Each new category runs on the same payments, logistics, and trust infrastructure. The goal is not to chase new users at all costs, but to give existing users more reasons to transact within a system they already trust.
This logic also explains initiatives like Vinted Ventures. By investing in re-commerce startups, Vinted extends its reach beyond the core platform while pulling ideas, partners, and category insight back into the ecosystem.
Strategic Lessons for Marketplace Founders
What makes Vinted worth studying is not that it got everything right. It is that it survived long enough to see what actually mattered.
The company did not win because it had a better vision than others. For many years, it barely had one. What it learned instead was how sensitive marketplaces are to order. Liquidity came first. Monetization came later.
The clearest lesson is that liquidity beats monetization early on. When Vinted removed seller fees in 2016, it accepted short-term pain to fix a deeper problem. A marketplace with perfect pricing and weak liquidity simply does not function.
Escrow payments, buyer protection, shipping control, moderation, and dispute handling were not cosmetic improvements. They changed user behavior. People bought more often, returned more often, and stopped moving transactions elsewhere. Logistics and payments became assets only after scale existed. Before that point, they would have been liabilities. Timing mattered more than ambition.
In the end, Vinted did not win by being smarter at every step. It won by being disciplined enough to change direction when reality disagreed. For marketplace founders, that may be the most practical lesson of all.
