Vinted is the secondhand clothing platform that is taking the world by storm. In conversation with the group’s founder and current CEO, Jennifer Sieg discusses what has recently driven the platform’s popularity to new heights.
Where did you get the dress? Vinted.
What should I do with all these old clothes? Vinted.
How am I supposed to afford a new pair of shoes? Vinted.
If you haven’t heard of it yet, you probably will soon. Vinted is the secondhand marketplace that has become a staple for fashion-conscious Londoners on a budget.
But even though the platform’s popularity has skyrocketed over the past year, its origins began over 15 years ago on a sofa in Lithuania.
As with all good companies, the path to seemingly unstoppable success was not easy.
In fact, the foundation for success only began to emerge when the team brought in some outside experts – after all, they had initially only been trying to sell a few items of clothing.
The origin of Vinted
Vinted was launched in 2008, a year after the first iPhone, as the brainchild of Lithuanian Milda Mitkute and her co-founder Justas Janauskas.
Mitkute tells Ambition AM that she can still hear the conversation she had with her stranger-turned-business partner Janauskas at a house party, discussing the frustration of lugging too many clothes into a too-small student apartment.
“He said, let’s do it,” she says, and answered like any young 22-year-old. Why not?
Rumor has it that the new friends were so excited to get started right away that they even forgot to add a “Buy” button.
“We had to make these mistakes,” says Mitkute, arguing that sometimes learning the hard way can be the hidden secret to a person’s success.
Mitkute wasn’t necessarily aware of Vinted’s potential as a lucrative venture. It wasn’t until a few years later, when an angel investor came on board, that things started to move forward.
He said, “Guys, you don’t know what you’ve created,” she laughs, explaining that at the time of founding the company, she didn’t even know what a start-up was.
But even though Mitkute admits she wasn’t particularly business-minded from the start, passion for her new project was much needed to keep it going all these years.
How could she ever have given her blood, sweat and tears to a completely new person?
Know your strengths – and accept your weaknesses.
“I have to admit that I am good at this, but also very weak here… I like listening to people who know more and learning from them,” she says.
Fortunately, Mitkute was able to shift her focus to other areas until her maternity leave in 2016 – she left the business to Janauskas and the group’s new CEO, Thomas Plantenga.
After years of working in the startup ecosystem, the Dutchman joined Vinted – initially as a consultant – at a time when the company was struggling to keep track of long-term growth. Within a year, he was promoted to CEO.
Sitting in his chair with his feet propped up and crossed, Plantenga tells me that his first task was extremely unpleasant: he had to lay off half the team and reduce existing seller fees.
“If you have to lay off half of a company’s workforce once in your life, and you have to lay off hard-working people with the best intentions, you never want to do it again,” he says.
“To avoid that, you have to run an extremely financially tight company. You have to know where your money is paying off, what the ROI is, how to grow your team responsibly, where to take risks without taking too many risks at the same time.”
Can founders do the same?
“This uncompromising focus on analysis and the ability to always deploy capital optimally – and not act on gut feeling – is, in my opinion, what you need to grow,” he says.
External perspective
“Coming from the outside, I was able to look at the current status quo without emotion. I could tell everyone on the management team that if they carry on like this, they will be dead in nine months,” he says.
It is not the first company that needed new leadership to take the next step.
But for the long-haired CEO, one thing is clear: the product that Mitkute and Janauskas brewed on a sofa that evening is still a success story.
“We weren’t good at branding, but we were good at developing technology,” he says, explaining why some people prefer shopping at Vinted to eBay-owned Depop, which is aimed at Gen Z.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a millennial, a Gen Z, a mother, a teenager or someone older, our goal is to create a product for society.”
What happens next? Most successful scale-ups start to enter the public market at some point. But Plantenga doesn’t seem to care.
“We take risks – in transportation, in pay, in expanding into new countries, in innovation – and it’s really nice to do that privately because you don’t have to constantly explain yourself or meet a certain quarterly target, which is what you have to do in the stock market,” he says.
“We will remain private for the foreseeable future.”
Nevertheless, after the company was recently valued at £3 billion in its 2021 funding round, Vinted seems to continue to be a topic of conversation among financiers and fashionistas.
