Vinted: with 16 million French users, second-hand clothes are now online

We see it more and more in small daily exchanges around a coffee or a restaurant table: Vinted and second-hand products, especially in clothing, are really in vogue aft. So much so that “I sold it on Vinted” are gradually replacing “I sold it on Le Bon Coin”. Knowing a huge success with French youth, Vinted allows you to empty dressing rooms, unearth nuggets, but also to make a little pocket money. “I really love selling, getting rid of clothes that I no longer wear and which take up a lot of space, preparing parcels, etc., says Elodie, user of the app. For those who like to hunt around, it is delightful to find a piece that is no longer in store, that we may have missed when it came out, sometimes new and for half the price!” Same observation at Adèle: “There are good surprises with branded items, very seasonal, where you just have to wait for someone to put the cheaper model on Vinted”. But if the success of the application is still recent, the company blew its thirteenth candle this year and millions of French people now use it daily.

A project initially without ambitions

Founded in 2008 in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, by Milda Mitkute ​​and Justas Janauskas, Vinted was originally a platform for exchanging and reselling clothes second-hand, targeting almost exclusively a female clientele. “Milda was still a student and above all passionate about fashion, says Natacha Blanchard, communications director at Vinted. The idea came to her when she moved to Vilnius to study there. She realized that she simply had too many clothes to take with her. It was then that she wanted to create a website where she could give away her clothes to her friends. Justas, who is a developer, therefore helped her find a solution to implement her platform idea”.

Realizing the potential of this platform, which was to be a small-scale project, the two founders then sought new investors and markets. The company launched two years later on the German and American markets, but it is in France that it has had its greatest success since its launch in France in 2013. Yet largely occupied by renowned platforms such as eBay, Le Bon Coin, or more modest ones such as Vestiaire Collective and Videdressing, France is now the app's main market with “more than 16 million registered members”.

On May 12, 2021, Vinted grew a little more. The European startup has announced the closing of a new funding round of 250 million euros ($303 million at today's rates), which values ​​the company at 3.5 billion euros ($4.2 billion). An exponential increase when we remember that the company “weighed” 1 billion dollars at the end of 2019.

Sell, but on a social network

Of course, Vinted is not alone in the niche. If you still use Facebook, you will surely have noticed that Mark Zuckerberg's application offers a section dedicated to the sale of objects, called Marketplace. You can find everything there: headphones, fans, cars, housing… That said, Marketplace is more like a newspaper’s classifieds page than a sales platform. Besides, there is no direct sale. On the other hand, Facebook allows direct contact with the seller – the two protagonists to manage for the settlement.

So says May, a 28-year-old graphic designer and avid app user. “I did some selling on Facebook Marketplace, as well as on Le Bon Coin, but these platforms are less fashion-oriented, she explains. In 2018, I was working for a ready-to-wear brand and had the opportunity to buy pieces at bargain prices during staff sales. As we could not try on the spot, that is when I downloaded Vinted to resell what did not suit me”. And become addicted to it. “We know that the community aspect on Vinted is very important for its users”, confirms the company.