EQT Growth’s investment in Vinted: Transforming our relationship with Fashion
AT EQT Growth, we spend a lot of time researching our prioritised sectors in order to invest behind macro trends. Online fashion is one area that has experienced incredible transformation in recent years, further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Of note, consumers increasingly consider climate change a key issue and plan to purchase more sustainable fashion. Younger generations, in particular, are increasingly conscious about sustainability, more concerned with factors like finding the right style and good functionality while saving money and creating less waste, rather than focusing on “newness” (which we saw rank last in some consumer surveys). Whereas second-hand fashion might have been stigmatised by prior generations, millennials and Gen-Z are driving the second-hand fashion market well into double-digit growth rates and yet second-hand still only makes up less than 7% of the total EUR450Bn+ total European addressable fashion market. Combined with the above, here at EQT Growth we are also huge fans of marketplace models and the liquidity they can unlock to broader audiences in increasingly more user friendly ways. Our marketplace experience also led us to the investment in Wolt, which helped to unleash better user experience for customers and more revenues for restaurants.
Vinted is at the intersection of all these trends, transforming the second-hand fashion market across Europe. Born out of Vilnius with an extraordinary product-driven mindset, Vinted has focused on using technology to automate, streamline and improve cumbersome aspects of the C2C marketplace dynamic, for example by improving the handling of fraud, payments and shipping. The company has also used technology to build a strong brand, with a proven playbook driving its customer acquisition campaigns, and it has innovated its business model in order to make it feasible for even low value items to be traded. Vinted’s marketplace now connects supply and demand across borders in Europe, well beyond the traditionally local nature of C2C marketplaces, unlocking trading that previously would not have been possible and driving people to buy and sell second-hand fashion at accelerating rates, while demonstrating strong network effects.
The company is led by an extraordinary management team, with marketplace veteran Thomas Plantenga at the helm. Like many breakout stories, Vinted was not always a straight line to its current scale. In 2016, the company had failed to monetise its early marketplace and had only a few months left of cash. What followed was a period of difficult choices, out-of-the-box thinking and grit. The team scaled back from certain geographies and doubled-down on continuously improving the product, being guided by only things that made customers happy. Fast forward to today and the marketplace is seeing billions of Euros traded per year at healthy margins.
It is with an immense amount of awe and humility that we announced today that EQT Growth led the EUR250m Series F in Vinted. We cannot wait to see the team continue to unlock the market for circular fashion through their differentiated approach and execution. Our mission at EQT Growth is to support European champions and Vinted is already an icon.
If you’re looking for an exciting journey, Vinted is hiring!
