Once the preserve of jumble sales and charity shops, “preloved” fashion and homewares are now leading style and shopping trends in the UK. After the rapid growth of online retail, Britain is now witnessing “the normalisation of secondhand”, according to Adam Jay, the chief executive of Vinted’s main marketplace arm – a key driver of the trend in recent years.
The UK is at the forefront of an international revolution, jostling for position with France to be Vinted’s biggest market, and is also one of its fastest growing markets, as the online marketplace moves beyond just selling clothes and into everything from smartphones and books to rugs.
“I see a deep and sustained change in how people buy and how people think about things that they own,” says Jay, who has been in the job since 2022.
“We’re a very meaningful part, now, of UK fashion, and we’re becoming a very meaningful part of the retail scene in other categories as well,” he says.
He says in the last five to 10 years Britons have embraced secondhand buying to a far greater degree, boosting not only Vinted but eBay – the subject of a recent $55.5bn (£41bn) takeover bid – and the UK startup Depop, Facebook Marketplace as well as numerous other smaller rivals. Preloved items now make up about a tenth of global fashion sales and Jay believes there is much further to go.
Together with the cut-price marketplaces Shein and Temu, Vinted has shaken up the UK retail scene, putting pressure on established online sellers including Asos and Boohoo, the budget high street chain Primark and even retailers such as John Lewis, Currys and Argos.
While Vinted’s green-tinged ambition to make secondhand the first choice may seem a world away from Shein, which sells cheap stuff direct from factories based mostly in China, Jay says both are benefiting from shoppers’ hunt for value as their spare cash is squeezed by rising energy and food costs.
He says Vinted, Shein and Temu are all growing for “fundamentally the same reason”, which is “because it’s cheap and easy. Our main competitor is new [products].” Vinted shoppers save an average 72% on the price of buying an equivalent new item, according to the company’s impact report published this week. Almost a third of the marketplace’s users say they use the savings to cover essential household expenses.
Vinted was founded in Lithuania in 2008 by then 22-year-old Milda Mitkuté, who came up with a plan – at a party with an old friend, Justas Janauskas – to clear out her wardrobe when moving house. Two weeks later, they launched a website to sell 100 items of Mitkuté’s clothing. So inexperienced were they in online retail, they forgot to include a “buy” button.
By 2014, the business had grown and launched in the UK. After a few false starts, it began to gain traction in 2021 as the nation cleaned out its wardrobe while stuck at home during the Covid pandemic.
By 2022, Vinted was being used by 8 million Britons, most of whom were women between 18 and 35. The following year that number doubled to 16 million. Now, Vinted refuses to disclose user numbers but says it is used by “millions” globally, is still growing and attracts a very broad demographic, from pensioners to parents and teens.
“My 84-year-old mother is selling on Vinted,” says Jay, a former executive at the travel company Expedia, who admits he is completely on-brand, making most of his personal purchases via the site. “Pretty much everything in our family is secondhand. The last two Christmases we had secondhand only Christmas or Vinted-only Christmas.”
The marketplace, which operates in more than 25 countries and now operates its own delivery service and financial services, was valued at €8bn (£7bn) in April when it sold €880m in shares to provide income for some longstanding investors. Sales through the site hit €10.8bn last year, putting it almost on a par with Primark on a global scale. Vinted, which takes a commission on each sale, generated €1.1bn in revenue, with net profits of €62m in 2025, down 19% on the previous year after a spending drive to expand.
In Britain, sales rose 47% last year, growing “significantly ahead” of other markets. “The UK has been incredible,” Jay says. Sales have been spurred by the company delving into new categories beyond fashion, to a total of 3,000 types of goods from phones and cameras to books.
Most have gone extremely well, except large furniture, where the difficulties and higher costs involved in handling larger items have put a dampener on sales.
Jay says Vinted is prepared to try lots of categories – even if some might not work straight away. “We want people to be thinking about how they can give every item as long as possible life. Don’t allow things to sit in the back of the cupboard for years and years untouched. Get them to someone who’s going to love them, wear them, use them.”