Vinted made second-hand fashion free to sell — and monetized the buyer instead

In 2008 Vilnius student Milda Mitkute, moving house and counting her ~300-piece wardrobe, built 'manodrabužiai' ('my clothes') with friend Justas Janauskas in two weeks — forgetting even a buy button at launch and selling 40 items in week one. Word of mouth and local radio carried it to Germany as kleiderkreisel.

In 2016 the company added a commission on sales — Milda's own verdict: 'Vinted's biggest mistake ever. Word of mouth and organic growth went to zero, we had 7–8 months of runway left'. New CEO Thomas Plantenga removed the fee, made both sides free, and rebuilt awareness with TV advertising while revenue moved to the buyer side: a protection fee (≈€0.70 + 5%; Vinted's official price list), optional seller bumps, and shipping on integrated labels.

The scale followed: in November 2019 a $128M round valued Vinted above $1B (Lithuania's first unicorn; 25M users, 180M items); 2022 brought luxury reseller Rebelle. 2023 was its first profitable year (€17.8M net on €596.3M revenue); 2024 revenue €813.4M (+36%) with €76.7M net profit on €7.3B GMV; 2025 GMV reached €10.8B (+47%) with €1.1B revenue and 100M+ users.

Charge the buyer, not the seller.

Sellers are supply and acquisition in one: free listings cost nothing to keep, while a fee costs the whole word-of-mouth engine — the 2016 experiment proved the elasticity in both directions.

Monetizing trust instead of trades converts GMV scale into profit: a small buyer fee plus logistics infrastructure scales with volume, not with seller rebellion.

In C2C marketplaces, tax the side with no alternatives—the buyer—and keep supply free; friction on growth shows instantly.

Vinted is Europe's largest resale-fashion marketplace: 2025 GMV €10.8B (+47%), revenue €1.1B, net profit €62M, over 100M users (18M in the UK alone) across 26+ markets, and a secondary-market valuation near €8B in 2026 — after a 2016 near-death that one pricing decision caused and one pricing decision fixed.