Quick Answer
As of April 2026, Vinted — the Lithuania-based resale platform — reported revenues of €1.1bn for 2025, up 38% year on year, with gross merchandise value surging 47% to €10.8bn across 26 countries, making it one of the fastest-growing consumer platforms in Europe. The detail not in the headline: Vinted has now expanded beyond fashion into electronics, homeware and collectables — a diversification that signals it is building toward something considerably larger than a clothing swap app. The platform’s early US rollout is the move that will determine whether this is a European success story or a global one — and the same cost-of-living pressures driving European consumers toward resale are now appearing in American household budgets too. Whether Vinted can export the cultural shift that made it dominant here is the question its next set of numbers will begin to answer.
Brighton’s Vintage Ecosystem
Brighton has one of the most active second-hand and sustainable fashion communities in the UK — from the vintage shops packed into the North Laine to the car boot sales at Hove Lawns that draw serious resellers every weekend. Vinted’s growth story is not an abstract European business narrative for this city. It is the commercial infrastructure behind a behavioural shift that Brighton residents have been living for several years already.
The Numbers Behind the Story
Vinted’s 2025 results are not merely good. For a consumer platform operating in the notoriously difficult European e-commerce environment — where logistics costs are high, consumer trust is hard-won and competition from fast fashion remains intense despite the sustainability conversation — they are exceptional.
Revenue of €1.1bn on gross merchandise value of €10.8bn reflects a take rate of just over 10% — a figure that has been rising steadily as Vinted has layered in additional services including its own delivery network, payment infrastructure and buyer protection products. The 47% GMV growth is the more significant number, because it reflects the underlying transaction volume on the platform rather than Vinted’s own revenue extraction — and that volume is what determines the long-term value of the business.
The profit dip is not a red flag. It is the deliberate signature of a platform investing aggressively in infrastructure at the precise moment its market position is strongest. Delivery, payments and international expansion are expensive upfront and compounding in their returns. Every logistics investment Vinted makes now reduces per-transaction costs at scale. Every market it enters before a competitor consolidates its position at lower cost than entering later would require.
The Cost-of-Living Tailwind
Vinted’s growth cannot be fully understood without the macroeconomic context in which it occurred. European households spent 2024 and 2025 absorbing the residual inflation shock of the post-pandemic period — energy bills, food costs and mortgage payments all elevated simultaneously. Discretionary spending contracted sharply, and the categories that contracted most were exactly the ones Vinted serves as an alternative: new clothing, new electronics, new homeware.
The platform sits at the intersection of two powerful and reinforcing trends. The first is economic — consumers who cannot afford new are discovering that second-hand is not a compromise but frequently a better product at a fraction of the price. The second is cultural — particularly among younger consumers, the sustainability argument for second-hand has shifted from niche conviction to mainstream behaviour. Brighton’s sustainable fashion scene has been ahead of that curve for years, but what Vinted has done is bring the infrastructure of trust and convenience that turns occasional second-hand shopping into a primary retail behaviour.
The Expansion Into Electronics and Homeware
The strategic significance of Vinted’s category expansion is easy to underestimate. Fashion was always the entry point — high transaction frequency, emotional engagement with product, low average order value making the platform accessible. Electronics and homeware change the economics considerably. A second-hand laptop or a vintage mid-century sideboard carries an order value ten to twenty times that of a second-hand dress. The take rate on those transactions, even if slightly lower, generates substantially more revenue per sale.
The collectables category is equally interesting. Collectables — vintage toys, sports memorabilia, rare books, ceramics — attract a buyer demographic with high disposable income and very specific search intent. These are not cost-of-living driven purchases. They are passion purchases, and passion purchases generate loyalty and repeat behaviour that cost-driven purchases do not always sustain.
Vinted is quietly building a platform that serves both ends of the consumer spectrum simultaneously — the budget-driven buyer trading necessity and the collector buyer trading passion. Very few platforms manage both. The ones that do tend to become extraordinarily durable businesses.
The US Question
The early US rollout is the most consequential strategic move Vinted has made, and the results are not yet visible in the numbers. The American resale market is already large — ThredUp, Poshmark and Depop have established positions — but none of them has achieved the seamless seller experience and buyer trust infrastructure that Vinted built in Europe through patient, market-by-market expansion.
The risk is real. American consumer behaviour around second-hand is different from European — the stigma attached to resale, while fading, has not disappeared in the way it largely has among younger European consumers. Logistics in the US at Vinted’s price points are considerably more complex than in the densely populated European markets where its delivery network was built.
But the opportunity is proportionate to the risk. A platform that cracks the US resale market with the same product quality and trust infrastructure that drove its European growth will not be a €10bn GMV business. It will be something considerably larger.
For now, Vinted is the clearest evidence that Europe’s cost-of-living crisis produced at least one unambiguous winner — and that winner is a Lithuanian startup that understood, before almost anyone else, that the future of retail might be built on everything that has already been bought once before.
Related Stories
- Brighton’s Best Vintage and Sustainable Fashion Shops
- The Brighton Guide to Sustainable Shopping
- How Brighton’s Second-Hand Economy Is Growing
