In 2008 a woman in Vilnius was moving flat with more clothes than would fit, so a friend built her a website to swap them with people she knew. In 2025 that website moved €10.8 billion of second-hand goods, took €1.1 billion in revenue and runs more than 500,000 parcel points across Europe

Milda Mitkutė was changing apartments in Vilnius in 2008 and had more clothes than the new place could hold. Rather than throw them out, she wanted a way to pass them on to people she knew. A friend, the software developer Justas Janauskas, built her a website for it. “We chatted about creating a website where people could trade their pre-loved fashion with each other,” Janauskas later told Tech.eu in 2015, recalling that he was doubtful the idea would go anywhere until he asked around and found most of his friends thought it was a good one.

The two of them built the earliest version as a side project, under a Lithuanian name that translated roughly to “my clothes,” with no marketing budget and no plan beyond friends trading with friends. What tipped it into something larger was almost accidental. A couch-surfing guest from Munich learned about the site, liked it, and helped carry the idea into Germany, where it launched under its own local name, Kleiderkreisel. Other country-specific spin-offs followed the same pattern for a few years, each with its own name and its own small user base, before the company folded them together under a single brand, Vinted, as the parent business decided a fragmented set of local sites made less sense than one platform users could recognise anywhere in Europe. Vilnius stayed its home throughout.

How a free listing site turns a profit

The part of Vinted’s model that isn’t obvious from the outside is that listing and selling on the platform costs a seller nothing. Vinted makes its money almost entirely from the buyer’s side of the transaction: a fixed fee of roughly $0.70 plus a variable fee of about 5 percent of the item’s price, charged in the buyer’s local currency (figures as of late 2025) — according to Vinted’s own Buyer Protection fee page. That fee covers payment processing and the cost of the prepaid shipping label the seller is given for free. It is close to the inverse of how rivals like Poshmark and Depop have historically operated, charging the seller a cut instead. Vinted also sells optional promotion to sellers who want more visibility: a feature called Closet Spotlight puts five of a seller’s listings into other users’ feeds for a week for a flat fee, and a per-item “bump” pushes a single listing up in search results, priced dynamically by category and demand.

From a hobby site to a logistics network

Underneath the fee structure sits a harder problem: getting a stranger’s old jumper from a seller’s flat to a buyer’s front door, cheaply and reliably, across dozens of countries. That has turned Vinted into as much a logistics company as a marketplace. According to the company’s own 2025 financial results, its delivery partner network now gives users access to more than 500,000 pick-up and drop-off points across Europe, and the company runs its own parcel carrier, Vinted Go, directly in five markets: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. In 2025 it also opened operations in Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia, seventeen years after that first Vilnius website, extending its reach into corners of Europe the original Kleiderkreisel-era patchwork of local sites never touched.

From a free site to a billion-dollar company

The money that built out Vinted’s logistics network came in stages, and the pace of it tracks how quickly investors decided the model was working. In November 2019, the company raised €128 million in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Accel, Insight Partners, Sprints Capital and Burda Principal Investments also participating, pushing its valuation past $1 billion for the first time and making it, according to the reporting on the round, Lithuania’s first unicorn. Lightspeed partner Brad Twohig said at the time the firm looked for “outlier management teams building generational companies,” a fairly standard line for a venture press release, but one that in this case was describing two people who had started out solving a problem for their own friends.

Two years later, in 2021, a further round led by EQT Growth brought in $303 million and roughly quadrupled the valuation again, to $4.5 billion, with the same core group of earlier investors returning. That was the last outside funding round before the company turned its first profit in 2023, at which point continued growth could increasingly be funded from the business itself rather than from new investors.

What the 2025 numbers actually show

Vinted’s first profitable year, by its own account, was 2023, when it reported revenue of €596.3 million and a net profit of €17.8 million, a milestone The Next Web covered as the company’s first since founding. Two years later, the picture is bigger but less straightforwardly better. Vinted moved €10.8 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, up 47 percent on the year before, and took €1.1 billion of that as revenue, up 38 percent, almost double the 2023 figure. But net profit, which had grown substantially in the years after 2023, fell 19 percent in 2025 to €62 million, and adjusted EBITDA slipped 5 percent to €151 million. CEO Thomas Plantenga framed the trade-off plainly in the release: the company is spending on expansion, including a push into Germany, category diversification beyond clothing, and the launch of a payments wallet called Vinted Pay, rather than banking the growth as profit this year.

That is a company choosing to spend faster than it earns while the market is still there to be taken, not a company in trouble. It is worth naming the distinction because the two can look similar on a spreadsheet, and a 19 percent drop in profit reads very differently once it’s clear the company was profitable at all only two years earlier, and is still profitable now, just less so by design.

A platform built on other people’s closets

What the €10.8 billion figure represents is how far secondhand clothing has moved from a hobby into ordinary consumer behaviour across Europe. The company has said it intends to bring the same model to the United States next, according to Dealroom’s coverage of the 2025 results. Whether Vinted’s European logistics playbook, built over seventeen years and hundreds of thousands of parcel points, transfers to a market with a completely different postal and returns infrastructure is the open question the 2025 numbers don’t answer.