I joined Forbes as the Europe News Editor and will be working with the London newsroom to define our coverage of emerging businesses and leaders across the UK and Europe.
Investors have thrown billions of dollars at loss-making luxury clothing resale platforms. But the Baltic country's first unicorn is now turning a profit by selling vintage looks for cheap.Plantenga bet the future of Vinted on a television advertisement. The secondhand clothing resale app was burning $1 million per month and had less than a year of cash left when Plantenga made an $800,000 gamble on French television.
His last recommendation to Vinted’s three cofounders—Milda Mitkute, Justas Janauskas and Mantas Mikuckas—was perhaps the most shocking. “I was advising them to burn all the cash on TV, and there were rumors I had been hired by the competition to destroy the company,” he says. John Dobosz is editor of Forbes Billionaire Investor, Forbes Dividend Investor and Forbes Premium Income Report.
Beyond Vinted’s startup rivals, there’s the granddaddy of online resale—eBay, which GlobalData estimates sold $11 billion worth of clothing last year. Vinted is less than half the size of Japanese app Mercari, which recorded revenue of $1.1 billion last year. Etsy tried to muscle into the clothing resale game with a $1.6 billion takeover of London-based Depop in 2021, while European players Zara and H&M are building out nascent in-house resale operations.
The pandemic’s e-commerce boom pitched Vinted into a battle for Britain, Europe’s largest e-commerce market, with Etsy, which had just bought Depop. “If we didn’t give everything we had, Etsy would have gotten a taste of how to beat us,” says Plantenga, who plowed more money into advertising and kept fine-tuning delivery options until Vinted finally cracked the U.K.
Thomas Plantenga E-Commerce Milda Mitkute Justas Janauskas Mantas Mikuckas Lithuania Startups Poshmark
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