The Year Secondhand Stopped Being The Alternative

Vinted has become the UK's third-largest fashion retailer by sales, behind only Primark and Next, and France's biggest clothing seller by volume, having overtaken Amazon and Kiabi in early 2025, according to Retail Week and the French Fashion Institute.

The Lithuania-based resale platform generated €1.1 billion in revenue in 2025, up 38% year-on-year, while the value of goods sold through the app rose 47% to €10.8 billion. It now counts 80 million users across more than 25 markets and is exploring a secondary share sale that would value the company at €8 billion.

What has driven growth so far is less demand for secondhand clothing than the removal of friction around buying it. Vinted built search, filtering, in-app messaging and integrated shipping around the same mechanics that made fast-fashion apps habit-forming: the scroll, the price-drop alert, the new listing matching a saved search. Resale's biggest barrier was rarely sentiment. It was inconvenience, and Vinted built around it.

That convenience cuts both ways. Textiles and apparel account for an estimated 2% to 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and less than 1% of material used to make clothing is recycled back into new garments. A recent analysis notes that Vinted's frictionless model mirrors the psychological patterns of ultra-fast fashion even as it diverts genuine volume from landfill. The same ease that makes resale viable at scale may also be normalising more frequent buying, not less.

The company's 2025 expansion into electronics, collectibles and sports equipment suggests its ambitions were never confined to clothing. The product, fundamentally, is a low-friction way to want things and get them; clothing was simply the category where the model proved out first. The same friction Vinted removed from secondhand clothes still exists in plenty of other categories where resale is currently clunkier than buying new: furniture, baby and children's equipment, and tools are all high-volume, low-frequency purchases where a well-built resale app could plausibly repeat the pattern. If the shift really is about convenience rather than conviction, the next frictionless-resale boom is unlikely to stay confined to Western Europe either; the same mechanics that worked on Vinted's clothing users should work just as well wherever secondhand goods are currently traded through classified ads and word of mouth rather than a proper marketplace.