It wasn’t so long ago that London’s most stylish would rather go hungry than pop into a Londis.
This forgettable chain of convenience stores used to traffic in knockoff Cheetos and mango-flavored vapes, not last-season Bottega Veneta. That’s all changed, thanks to Vinted, an app for buying and selling secondhand clothing that uses low-priced shippers to shuttle used goods between mini-marts all over the country.
These days, Londis and its competitors are a great place to people-watch. Matilda Goad, a designer of housewares, hits one near her home in Kensal Green two or three days a week to pick up everything from a corduroy Chloé suit to Bonpoint knits for her young children.
“I’m always on my phone, but it’s not necessarily because I’m on Instagram,” she admits. “I’m just obsessed with trying to find a bargain on Vinted.”
For the Sanford family, in West London, everyone gets in on the fun. Lucinda, an interior designer, discovered the app through her 14-year-old daughter, Clemmie. Now all three Sanford children buy their clothes and shoes from Vinted. Lucinda directs the energy she once reserved for storming sample sales to finding an Emilia Wickstead dress and Philip Treacy hat for Royal Ascot. To complete the cycle, her husband, Ed, sells the castoffs. “He hates waste so much,” says Lucinda.
Today, Vinted has over 105 million users in more than 20 countries, mostly in Europe. (There’s a small but growing community in the United States and Canada.) In some countries, such as Ireland, its app is even more popular than the indispensable Uber and Instagram. The first “pre-loved” fashion platform to turn a profit, Vinted was founded by Milda Mitkute and Justas Janauskas in Lithuania in 2008. It now has upward of 2,000 employees, and, in 2019, it became Lithuania’s first “unicorn” company when it was valued at more than $1 billion. Today, it’s worth over $5 billion.
There’s no shortage of online marketplaces for used clothing, but Poshmark, eBay, the Real Real, and Vestiaire Collective are nowhere near as user-friendly and frictionless as Vinted. It takes less than 45 seconds to list an item, and there’s no need to wrestle with a box or a mailing label. (Amazon sells Vinted-branded mailing bags in bulk for around $6.)
When an item is purchased, the app e-mails the seller a barcode, which is scanned at the drop-off point and shipped to a pickup point near the buyer. Within three days or so, those too-tight jeans have a new home. Door-to-door delivery is available for an extra dollar or two, depending on the size of the parcel. Because Vinted uses independent shippers such as Yodel and InPost, rather than FedEx and DHL, most shipments cost less than $5.
Vinted earns revenue from “bumping” one’s products on its Web site, so they are more visible in a search, and charges buyers a $1.29 fee for each purchase.
For fashion lovers who shop and purge with equal zeal, it’s more fun than Fortnite. Prices—no matter how low—are passionately negotiated. Securing a five-star rating is paramount, so transactions must be completed promptly, and merchandise should be represented accurately.
And, please, don’t sleep on the shipping. Your marriage could implode or your child could start working for DOGE, but, warns creative consultant and ceramist Kim Sion, “you have to get that Vinted parcel to the drop-off. Otherwise, that rating goes down, and that’s just terrible.”
Vinted doesn’t discriminate between luxury and fast fashion. Its scale means that there’s plenty of appetite for both. “I bought a fantastic Patagonia fleece for, like, 50 pounds, and they’re, like, 200 in the shop,” says Sion. “You always find what you want.”
Vinted’s popularity is due, in part, to belt-tightening among British consumers, propelled by the lingering effects of Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, and now the threat of Trump’s trade wars. The fashion industry is in the midst of a cyclical slowdown, according to a McKinsey report published in 2024, and this year is “likely to be a time of reckoning for many brands.”
But, for many users, the beauty of Vinted has little to do with the money. It’s about ensuring that your old crop tops don’t end up languishing with all the others in the Korle Lagoon, in Ghana, one of the most polluted bodies of water on earth. (The country is among the world’s top importers of secondhand clothes, many of which are ultimately discarded.)
“It just feels good to know that it’s going to a happy home, rather than feeling terrible with the guilt of spending money on something you’ve never worn,” says Sion. “Sometimes I’ll wrap it in a bit of really expensive tissue paper.”
Like anything else, Vinted has its quirks. There’s an awful lot of “favoriting”—in which shoppers click a small heart icon to save an item—with no follow-up. (Goad does it with abandon to inform Vinted’s algorithm of exactly what she likes.) It’s exasperating for obsessive sellers like Sion, who are eager to move out merchandise. “Why are you favoriting something for two pound 50?” she says. “Go on, make the jump. You’re getting a Balenciaga jacket for less than a tube of Pringles.”
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at Air Mail and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast
