Announcing Lightspeed Growth’s investment in Vinted, the world’s leading pre-loved fashion platform
On the Lightspeed Growth team, we look for outlier management teams building generational companies. Over the years, we have been fortunate backers of several innovative fashion and apparel businesses with these qualities, such as online personal styling company Stitchfix (Nasdaq: SFIX), menswear pioneer Bonobos (acquired by Walmart), and sustainable footwear company Rothy’s, to name a few.
We are beyond excited to extend our sector experience into Europe and partner with another generational fashion business, announcing today that we have led €128m Series E round in Vinted.
Based in Lithuania, Vinted has quietly emerged as Europe’s largest and fastest growing secondhand apparel and kids’ item consumer to consumer marketplace. Steered by an exceptional team which we have known for years, Vinted is changing the face of the €1 trillion global fashion retail industry. As we have seen with Rothy’s and other investments, today’s consumer is increasingly driven by the need for sustainability and affordable variety. One of the resulting effects is that she hence often chooses pre-loved apparel and other items, so much so that second-hand fashion will shortly overtake fast-fashion as a category, meaning among other things longer lifetime for items and much-reduced landfill impact. Vinted is the top player globally setting this trend, with €1.3BN worth of fashion items expected to change hands this year on its platform.
As we have been in close touch with the Vinted team for a while, once the opportunity came up to help them continue to build on their success, we immediately jumped at the chance. Vinted has that rare combination of a world-class team with impressive ability to execute, one of the most amazing products we have seen that surpasses many social networks by time spent, a passionate and highly engaged member base, and unstoppable macro trends in consumer behavior.
Perhaps most importantly, Vinted has shown an ability over the years to adapt and expand its business during both good times and challenging ones. While Vinted has been around since 2008, this is very much so just the beginning and Lightspeed Growth is proud to partner with the CEO Thomas Plantenga and the team in their next phase of growth.
-Bradley Twohig, Rytis Vitkauskas, and Anoushka Vaswani
