Part of the fabric of society: How Thomas Plantenga is making Vinted the Amazon of secondhand

Vinted is one of the most popular secondhand marketplaces in Europe, attracting millions of users each year. But just a decade ago, it was hitting a rough patch.

Founded in 2008 by Milda Mitkute and Justas Janauskas, users flocked to the company’s sites, initially in Lithuania, Germany, and the Czech Republic, to sell their clothes and accessories. By 2016, Vinted had not yet established a viable commercial model, and its markets operated independently rather than as a unified business.

Its advertising revenues were barely covering server costs. The company was burning cash and jostling for position alongside its rivals.

It’s taken an extraordinary leader and strategic investment from a truly supportive investor to allow Vinted to flourish. Today, its valuation tops €5B, and analysts put Vinted among the top five players in a market set to be worth $521.5B by 2034. Headquartered in Lithuania, it became the country’s first unicorn in 2019, but it could have been a very different story.

“I had no idea how big this could be”

Born and raised in the Netherlands, Vinted’s CEO Thomas Plantenga is a biophysicist by training.

Plantenga was attracted to the secondhand market because of its sheer complexity. “I studied how to model multivariate complex systems,” he explains. “But what I actually learned was how to grab a complex, hard-to-predict system, slice it into smaller problems, and then turn it into a predictable model,” he adds.

In Plantenga’s eyes, user behaviour isn’t so different from fluid dynamics, which he studied in his undergraduate and master’s degrees.

“Users flow through a product just like fluid flows through your blood, they have pressure points and acceleration moments.”

In 2010, he launched Bookaboat and joined consultancy Harvest, marking his entry into consumer marketplaces and turnarounds. By 2013, Harvest had been acquired by global classifieds platform OLX, where he took on a leadership role overseeing strategy in emerging markets. In 2014, he was recruited by OLX and FJ Labs cofounder Fabrice Grinda to help launch Sell It, a mobile-first classifieds startup.

When Insight portfolio company Wallapop acquired Sell It in 2015, they brought him on to lead their U.S. expansion, further cementing his reputation as a sharp operator skilled in scaling and restructuring marketplace businesses.

“The real reason my career evolved is that there was always a boss who asked me to solve a problem. And then I’d say, ‘Okay, let’s go and fix it.’”

He had made a name for himself as a problem-solver, and in 2016, Plantenga was introduced to Vinted through Insight — a connection that would mark the beginning of a close partnership with Managing Director Deven Parekh.

Plantenga joined Vinted for a five-week gig as a consultant. Living in New York at the time, he knew that Vinted was experiencing some “bumps in the road,” but when he arrived, the issues he discovered were “a bit bigger than bumps.”

“Vinted had just introduced a 20% seller fee,” he explains. This was the same model employed by rivals eBay and Poshmark. “But when they did that, everybody started to leave the platform. Vinted was going to be out of business in nine to 12 months.”

Plantenga relocated to Vilnius, Lithuania, and dramatically downsized the business, reducing the workforce by more than a third and closing every office except the headquarters. He scrapped the 20% seller fee, instead introducing a buyer protection fee and merging all the apps, creating one scalable technology platform.

With the fundamentals in place, Plantenga made a bold bet: a major TV and digital advertising campaign to attract new users.

The bet paid off. After overhauling customer support to make Vinted a truly trusted marketplace, sales spiked. A year and a half into his tenure, with the founders’ blessing, Plantenga became CEO.

“The first milestone to hit was to build a company that is financially sustainable,” he explains. “I just wanted to reach break-even. I had no idea how big this could be or what it could become.”

Scale up your career: See all open roles at Vinted.

The investor POV

“He doesn’t hide anything or spin anything. And we don’t pull any punches.”

Insight Partners has supported Vinted for over a decade, with Parekh as a longstanding board member, and Managing Director AJ Malhotra having been involved for the past five years.

“They’re great partners to work with,” Plantenga says. “They go deep into the topics they know…but when we’re just operating, they let us operate as we want, which I really appreciate,” he adds.

Insight led the company’s Series B in 2014, when the business raised €20M to service its 3 million users. A year later, Insight participated in their €25M Series C.

“When Thomas joined the business, the thesis was unclear,” says Parekh. “Vinted was building traffic, but they never figured out a revenue model.”

Plantenga’s approach to building revenue impressed the board. “His whole model is testing-based,” explains Parekh. “You test something quickly and see if it works.”

Investors found Plantenga easy to trust because of his “radical transparency.” “We give him our opinion, but then we support whatever decision he makes. The result is a very trusting relationship,” says Parekh.

“We get straight to the point, and if we disagree, we discuss how to solve problems in a transactional way.”

“I’m Dutch, so I’m direct, and they are from New York, so they are also direct,” explains Plantenga. “We get straight to the point, and if we disagree, we discuss how to solve problems in a transactional way.”

Following Plantenga’s appointment, Insight doubled down on its investment, and in 2019, the marketplace was valued at €1B, making it Lithuania’s first tech unicorn.

In 2021, Vinted secured a €250M Series F at a 3.5x valuation.

M&A has also played a crucial role in Vinted’s strategy, with Malhotra advising on some of these decisions. Vinted has brought multiple competitors into the fold: for example, Chicfy, a Spanish company, was acquired in 2019, and Netherlands-based United Wardrobe was the standout industry deal in 2020.

In 2022, German second-hand luxury marketplace Rebelle was acquired, followed by Danish marketplace Trendsales in 2024.

Plantenga has also leveraged Insight to make some key hires: notably Adam Jay in 2022, CEO of Vinted Marketplace, and CFO Maurizio D’Arrigo in 2024. These appointments have allowed Plantenga to focus on the big picture.

It has been easy to convince top talent to join Vinted, says Parekh. “Talented people are excited to work for him because he is mission-driven and lets them do what they are good at.”

Trust wins in critical moments

Over the years, Parekh’s “analytical rigor” has been impactful. After Plantenga announced ambitious expansion plans in 2021, Parekh urged caution. “He told me I was making a big mistake,” says Plantenga.

“He said: ‘Don’t burn all that money. The financial markets are about to collapse.’ We adjusted the plan so that we could be financially independent without requiring any more investment.”

“The financial markets did collapse, and companies were unable to raise a single euro. After that, the Ukraine war started. But we were protected from all that instability by our conservative budget.”

And the trust goes both ways. When Plantenga decided to stop trading during the early days of COVID-19, amid fears that sending parcels could spread the disease, his board supported him: “I remember that Deven was very clear that it was the right ethical choice to take, which I really appreciated.”

“Any [investor] can say they are founder friendly, but it’s the relationships you build during hard times that create trust.”

Plantenga also recalls his relief when Insight turned down a bid for the company shortly after his turnaround: “Deven could have thought, ‘Let’s just get our money back.’ But Deven supported us at that super critical moment, and now we have a €5B company.”

Today, Vinted stands out from its rivals: It is growing and profitable in its core markets. From its heartland in France and Germany, Vinted is now leading the pack in the U.K. and Italy, too.

Vinted is currently focused on category expansion. “We are now in luxury fashion,” says Plantenga. “We’re doing item verification, which makes it possible to sell safely on the platform. The second big one is electronics; we went into mobile phones. Now we’re going into collectibles.”

“By the end of the year, you’ll be able to sell every single product in your home through our app.”

The Vinted value chain

Plantenga embodies a new style of CEO. He wants Vinted to be successful while having a positive impact on society.

“From parents who need to make some cash to pay their rent and want to clothe their children in an affordable way, to university students who want to kit-out their new dorm room while on a student loan— people who can really use an extra $200 a month to make ends meet. This is who we serve.”

In his spare time, Plantenga is a close follower of the industry, whether that’s reading financial statements of e-commerce giants like Amazon and Etsy, or keeping up with the latest innovations and developments of smaller players globally.

“When you look at AWS and see how much they spent on servers and shipping, you realize that by going deeper into the value chain, it becomes profitable, and a revenue driver for the business,” he explains.

Vinted now also has a shipping arm called Vinted Go. It is currently building its own payments company, Vinted Pay, enabling it to offer wallet services and more in the future.

Plantenga’s vision is to turn Vinted into the “Amazon of secondhand” — a place where you can get any consumers goods, secondhand.

Success means doing “the unsexy things,” he says. “Shaving cent after cent off [the cost of sending] a parcel. We have our own servers that we run ourselves because that’s cheaper than running them in the cloud.”

Vinted’s latest round — a secondary share sale of €340M led by asset manager TPG — diversifies its investor base with new expertise and rewards its employees and early investors for their contributions to Vinted’s success.

“Our success lies in Europe, but if we cracked the U.S., that would be tremendous,” says Plantenga.

“We want to be part of the fabric of society,” Plantenga says. “Something that always works, where you can trade anything, as easily as you turn on a tap.”