Vinted Reached Profitability While the Primary Market Slowed

What the Numbers Showed

Vinted, the Vilnius-based peer-to-peer clothing marketplace, reported its first full-year profit in 2023: €18 million on revenues of approximately €596 million, according to its published accounts. Both figures represented sharp moves from the prior year, when the company posted a loss against revenues roughly a third lower. The platform operates across more than twenty European markets plus Canada, charging buyers a transaction fee rather than listing sellers — a structural choice that has driven listing volumes and, in 2023, finally produced a surplus.

The same year delivered a notably different message from the primary market. LVMH reported full-year 2023 organic revenue growth of around 13 percent, a deceleration from the 17 percent organic growth it had recorded in 2022. Kering's results were sharper still: the group's revenues fell in the second half of 2023, dragged by weakness at Gucci, which posted an organic decline for the year as a whole. Both groups attributed the softness to a normalisation of post-pandemic luxury demand and a slowdown in Chinese consumer spending — the same combination that had inflated their earlier figures. Richemont and Hermès held more steadily, Hermès in particular sustaining growth through its constrained-supply model, but the broader luxury sector's consensus by late 2023 was that the extraordinary run of 2021 and 2022 had ended.

The RealReal, the US-based authenticated-luxury resale platform, occupied an awkward middle position. It handles precisely the brands whose primary-market owners were decelerating, and it remained unprofitable through 2023, reporting a net loss of approximately $145 million for the year against revenues of around $580 million. The RealReal's trajectory — years of widening losses followed by incremental improvements as it cut headcount and tightened authentication costs — illustrates a structural reality that Vinted avoids: authenticated luxury resale is labour-intensive in a way that peer-to-peer commodity resale is not. Vinted's sellers photograph their own items and set their own prices; The RealReal employs gemologists and brand specialists whose costs scale with volume.

What the Divergence Suggests

The contrast is not simply luxury versus mass-market resale. It points to where discretionary clothing spend was concentrating as real wages remained under pressure in most European markets and US consumer confidence stayed uneven. Vinted's revenue model captures a slice of every transaction on a platform where millions of items are listed for under €20. At that price point, resale is not competing with the primary luxury market — it is absorbing spend that might otherwise go to fast fashion or mid-market retail, categories that were themselves under significant pressure in 2023. ASOS, for instance, reported a statutory pre-tax loss for its financial year ending August 2023 and issued a series of profit warnings through the period.

ThredUp's annual Resale Report, which aggregates projections for the secondhand clothing market, has consistently estimated the global secondhand apparel sector growing at multiples of the rate of the broader apparel market — though, as the gap between Vinted's profitability and The RealReal's losses shows, growth in the category does not distribute evenly across every platform in it. Business model determines unit economics as much as category tailwinds do.

The luxury slowdown also raised a specific question about resale supply. When primary luxury sales soften, the pipeline of nearly-new goods entering authenticated resale platforms theoretically tightens, since fewer items are being bought at retail. Whether that dynamic materially constrained The RealReal's supply in 2023 is not something its published accounts resolve. What the accounts do resolve is that the platform's path to profitability remained distant while Vinted's arrived — and that those two outcomes, in the same calendar year, described rather different things about what resale's economics actually look like at scale.