Vinted

Vinted was nine months from going bankrupt in 2016.

Ten years later, it's worth 8 billion euros.

Its founder says he stole the whole plan.

That's not what saved the company.

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THE SETUP

By 2016, Vinted had spent years expanding in every direction at once. Offices in San Francisco, London, Munich and Paris. Headcount near 240. A different app running in almost every country it operated in, none of them talking to each other. Advertising revenue was barely covering the cost of running the servers. The business had scale without a working way to make money from it.

Then it introduced a 20% fee on sellers, the same model eBay and most rivals used. That was meant to fix the revenue problem. Instead, sellers left rather than pay it and a company already thin on cash lost the one thing keeping it alive: listings.

Two of its own investors, Insight and Accel, had already written the investment off to zero. Vinted had somewhere between nine and twelve months of cash left.

Thomas Plantenga, the now CEO, was flown in for what was meant to be a five week consulting job. He scrapped the seller fee completely. Sellers would list for free. Buyers would pay instead, a small fee that covered protection and support.

In a Bloomberg profile published on 28 July 2026, Plantenga said he built Vinted by reading business reports from Amazon, MercadoLibre, Mercari and Costco and stealing the best parts of each. In the same interview, he said he'd built something nobody had ever built before.

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THE PLAYBOOK

1. Charge the buyer, not the seller

Once sellers could list for free, more clothes were listed. More clothes meant more choice and choice is what actually brought buyers to the resale app in the first place. Once those buyers were already there, looking at a specific dress or a pair of trainers they wanted, a small fee on the way out barely mattered to them. It mattered a great deal more to a seller deciding whether it was even worth listing an old jumper.

That's the angle. Sellers are price sensitive about the decision to list something at all. Buyers are far less price sensitive once they've already found the thing they want. Move the fee from the sensitive side of the trade to the insensitive side and a shrinking marketplace starts growing again.

By the end of 2017, once the new model was live and headcount had been cut from 240 to 150, Vinted processed $360 million in sales for the year.

Bloomberg's own reporting traces the same chain forward from there: the change attracted more inventory, improved marketplace liquidity and laid the foundation for the profitability that funded the entire expansion.

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Takeaway: work out which side of a deal cares about the fee and charge the other side instead. Most businesses charge whoever's easiest to bill, not whoever's easiest to lose. If a fee is scaring off the people who create supply, move it onto the people who've already decided to buy.

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2. What a rival won't copy

eBay charges sellers a final value fee close to 13% on every sale. On $79.6 billion of goods sold through the platform in 2025, that's a large, predictable amount of revenue landing every quarter, the kind shareholders already expect.

Switching to Vinted's model would mean giving that revenue up immediately and betting that enough new listings and buyers can make up for it. That is a massive bet for a Public listed company.

Poshmark held a flat 20% seller commission for years. Both eBay and Poshmark only began moving toward buyer-fee elements once Vinted had already proven the model worked, in a market they weren't even competing in. eBay chose to buy Depop for roughly $1.2 billion in 2026 instead of rebuilding its own fee model from scratch.

It’s hard to explain this decision any other way: two decades of an unchanged fee, followed by a shift only once someone else had already taken the financial hit of proving the alternative worked. It looked like Vinted had set the direction.

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Takeaway: the slowest company to copy a good idea is usually the one already making money from the old way of doing it. Seeing something work isn't the problem. Giving up the revenue to switch is.

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3. Funding the boring stuff

This all happened after the cash crisis, funded by a business that had already proven it could make money: a €50 million raise in 2018, a Series E in 2019 that valued the company above €1 billion, a Series F in 2021 at €3.5 billion and Vinted's first full year of profit in 2023.

Only once that money and that profit existed did Vinted start building its own servers, its own delivery network in Vinted Go and its own payments business in Vinted Pay, after securing a banking licence in 2023.

Plantenga has compared it to Amazon directly. Watching how much the company spends running its own servers and shipping convinced him that owning that layer becomes a profit driver rather than a cost.

Every parcel a third-party courier or payment processor handles takes a cut on the way through. Owning that layer keeps the cut inside Vinted and gives it control over things a marketplace can't easily outsource: how fast a parcel moves, how a dispute gets resolved, what a refund costs to process.

Vinted Go now runs more than 18,000 pickup points across five markets and has started selling that delivery network to outside clients, on top of handling Vinted's own parcels.

That's also why net profit fell 19% in 2025 even as sales rose 47%. Vinted's own results describe the drop as deliberate: money that would otherwise have shown up as profit went instead into Germany, into Vinted Go and into Vinted Pay.

A shrinking margin usually means something's going wrong. Here, Vinted is telling its own investors it's investing into the future.

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Takeaway: copying other companies is a luxury, not a rescue plan. You do it once the business is stable enough to think years ahead, not while you're still trying to make it to next quarter.

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ONE MORE THING

Plantenga says he built Vinted by stealing from Amazon, MercadoLibre, Mercari and Costco.

None of those four companies let sellers list for free and charge the buyer instead.

His story explains how Vinted scaled. It doesn't explain how Vinted survived long enough to scale.

The one part of the plan that saved the company in Europe could be the same part that stops it working in America. Bloomberg Intelligence's Poonam Goyal has pointed to a real risk here: American shoppers are used to Amazon's free shipping and no add-on fees, so a separate charge at checkout stands out far more there than it does in Europe.

The fee that built Vinted at home is walking into a market that already hates paying it.

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THE PAPER TRAIL

The €400,000 Bet That Nobody Talks About

Watch time: 38 minutes

Adam Jay: the Expedia executive who left a decade-long career to run Vinted's marketplace has publicly revealed a specific €400,000 "gamble" that saved the company during its darkest period

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_i6iCBEz_A

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The Empty Box Scam: How Vinted's Buyer-Protection "Genius" Became a Fraud Machine

Read time: 3 minutes

The buyer-fee model that Plantenga's entire empire rests on has spawned an organised fraud economy. Buyers claiming counterfeit or "damaged" items, sending back empty boxes and pocketing full refunds while keeping the goods, with Vinted's automated dispute system allegedly favouring buyers by default.

https://www.silentid.co.uk/vinted-scam-statistics/

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The Playbook Vinted "Stole" Was Written Four Years Before Plantenga Even Arrived

Read time: 15 minutes

Fabrice Grinda: the OLX co-founder who effectively installed Plantenga at Vinted says in a recent interview that he wrote the entire buyer-pays, free-listing "classifieds 3.0" strategy on his own blog back in 2012 and that "step one at Vinted was apply literally the OLX playbook." This directly challenges Plantenga's Bloomberg claim of having personally reverse-engineered the model from studying Amazon, MercadoLibre, Mercari and Costco.

https://fabricegrinda.com/winner-takes-most-with-liontrees-antal-runnebom/

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