Thomas Plantenga bet the future of Vinted on a television advertisement. The secondhand clothing resale app was burning $1 million per month and had less than a year of cash left when Plantenga made an $800,000 gamble on French television. It was May 2016, and Plantenga had recently been hired to save the eight-year-old Lithuanian startup. After its founding at a college party in 2008, Vinted had grown rapidly as people from 10 countries used its platform to buy and sell secondhand clothes.
But it was free for users, barely covering its server costs with advertising, and an attempt in 2014 to bolt on a Poshmark-style 20% sales commission resulted in a user revolt. Traffic almost halved overnight. The Netherlands-born Plantenga, who had never been to Lithuania, signed up for a five-week gig as a consultant in May 2016. He ended up becoming Vinted’s CEO 18 months later.
Seven years later, Vinted is one of Europe’s largest consumer marketplaces, with over $600 million of revenue in 2023. It now counts 100 million users globally. Last year, it posted its first annual profit—at least $20 million—distinguishing it from its loss-making American cousins including The RealReal (valued at $360 million), ThredUp ($200 million) and Poshmark (sold for $1.2 billion). Vinted became the Baltic nation’s first unicorn in 2019 when it raised $140 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, and sales have since grown sixfold.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/04/15/how-lithuanian-startup-vinted-spun-secondhand-clothes-sales-into-gold/?sh=5a47e3eaa3f0
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.
But it was free for users, barely covering its server costs with advertising, and an attempt in 2014 to bolt on a Poshmark-style 20% sales commission resulted in a user revolt. Traffic almost halved overnight. The Netherlands-born Plantenga, who had never been to Lithuania, signed up for a five-week gig as a consultant in May 2016. He ended up becoming Vinted’s CEO 18 months later.
Seven years later, Vinted is one of Europe’s largest consumer marketplaces, with over $600 million of revenue in 2023. It now counts 100 million users globally. Last year, it posted its first annual profit—at least $20 million—distinguishing it from its loss-making American cousins including The RealReal (valued at $360 million), ThredUp ($200 million) and Poshmark (sold for $1.2 billion). Vinted became the Baltic nation’s first unicorn in 2019 when it raised $140 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, and sales have since grown sixfold.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/04/15/how-lithuanian-startup-vinted-spun-secondhand-clothes-sales-into-gold/?sh=5a47e3eaa3f0
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 Vintage is a startup based out of Vilnius, Lithuania, and they specialize in the resell
00:07 of clothing.
00:08 So they compete with brands like eBay, Poshmark, but they've come to really dominate the sector
00:14 within Europe.
00:15 They've been in operation now since 2008.
00:18 They've had a few different iterations of the business, initially starting for free
00:23 and then trying to move to a kind of Poshmark style model.
00:27 Now in their kind of latest form, they're focused on only charging buyers fees and making
00:32 it free for sellers to operate.
00:34 Nobody has ever sold as much secondhand items as we're doing in a country.
00:39 So the secondhand transactions per capita that we're creating in markets like France,
00:44 Belgium, and the Netherlands is at the level that nowhere in the world has ever been achieved
00:48 before.
00:49 But even at that penetration level, we're still showing very, very strong growth.
00:54 So it's really that we're creating that market by making this product available.
00:59 Also look at the tracking of our competitors.
01:01 It's not that our competitors or secondhand shops are not selling anymore.
01:05 Actually, they're thriving as well.
01:07 Yet we grow all on top of that at a pace that is harder and faster than everybody else.
01:11 And therefore we're creating this new market by making it economically viable and super
01:16 easy to sell and buy secondhand clothing.
01:20 So Vinted is a company that I've been tracking for a while and just have a sort of personal
01:24 metric for how successful they've been.
01:26 Just in terms of my local bodega is a pickup and drop off point for people to send in their
01:33 e-commerce packages and like sort of every week I'm keeping track of just sort of how
01:38 many Vinted parcels were piling up and overtaking Amazon, eBay.
01:43 But also in this time, the kind of the global resale market has really boomed.
01:48 One of the American competitors for Vinted, throw it up as predicting that the kind of
01:51 the global market for secondhand goods is going to grow to like over 350 billion in
01:56 the next couple of years.
01:58 This is kind of partly driven by cost of living and consumers feeling constrained in terms
02:04 of spending.
02:05 Also kind of a generational shift in terms of how people want to shop and consume.
02:11 People are interested in sort of sustainability and also kind of having a unique look.
02:16 And Vinted has been really able to kind of capitalize on this trend and have been particularly
02:20 successful within Europe.
02:26 The US has been stuck on, let's say, the old classic eBay model, which is a 20 percent
02:30 seller fee.
02:31 And what we did is we said, OK, we're going to make that practically four times less expensive
02:36 to 5 percent.
02:37 And we put it on the buy side instead of the sell side, because it's the buyer who gets
02:41 practically the comfort of buying online, the buyer protection, that insurance that
02:45 we give.
02:47 And thereby we let them pay for it.
02:49 And the seller who brings the goods to the table actually doesn't have to pay anything.
02:53 I joined Vinted as a consultant in 2016.
02:57 I then was living in New York and moved here to help out for five weeks.
03:03 That escalated into me becoming the CEO of Vinted and living here now for almost eight
03:07 years.
03:08 I found a lot of young, enthusiastic people really wanted to build something, but a business
03:14 model that was not working.
03:16 I had the right knowledge to make the changes into the business model and how we operate
03:22 to make all that enthusiasm work into the right direction to make it a well-working
03:27 business.
03:30 We don't know how large this is going to be.
03:32 The secondhand transactions per capita that we're creating in markets like France, Belgium
03:37 and the Netherlands is at the level that nowhere in the world has ever been achieved before.
03:42 But even at that penetration level, we're still showing very, very strong growth.
03:46 So it's really that we're creating that market by making this product available.
03:52 The more items you have available to be bought, the higher the probability that somebody will
03:57 find an item that they like.
03:59 If you think about the sustainability element, we do two things very well.
04:03 So majority of our shipping is locker shipping from locker to locker.
04:07 So you pick it up yourself.
04:09 That type of shipping has 62% more CO2 efficiency than home delivery, obviously, because you
04:15 don't have to drive to everybody's home.
04:17 Then what we see is that one in three transactions on our platform avoids the purchase of a new
04:21 item.
04:22 And thereby we see that every transaction on average avoids 1.8 kilograms of CO2 compared
04:29 to buying new items.
04:31 When and whether there will be an IPO depends on many different things.
04:35 As a company, we would be ready for that.
04:37 But what we're trying to do is we try to ensure that we choose the best possible path long
04:42 term for this company.
04:44 IPO is just a way of financing the company and financially structuring it.
04:48 We're just making sure now that we are investing our money in the right things to hold the
04:52 right growth rates and organize ourselves in the right way to achieve our long term
04:56 goals.
04:57 Therefore, I now my title as a group CEO and not just CEO.
05:01 And we have our CEO of Marketplace, Adam Jay, who runs the whole marketplace.
05:05 We have Freetautas who runs the whole shipping division.
05:08 We have Modestas who runs the whole payments division.
05:11 And by creating separate CEOs on each of these divisions, we're creating a system that enables
05:18 us to build an ecosystem of businesses and to build a sustainable long term strong and
05:24 big company in Europe.
05:26 We need to compete with ecosystems that are available in the US and in China.
05:30 We cannot just be a vulnerable single vertical marketplace.
05:34 We have to become an ecosystem of businesses that strengthen each other and thereby takes
05:38 a position that can survive for decades instead of something that will be a fad for the next
05:44 few years.
05:45 [Music]
05:47 [Music]
05:49 [Music]
05:51 [BLANK_AUDIO]