How does Vinted make money?

Vinted charges sellers a $1-5 fee on every item of clothing successfully sold in its marketplace

Like YourMechanic, whose business model I wrote about a couple weeks ago, Vinted was one of the companies that joined one of our sharing economy panels at Vator Splash Spring 2016. Where YourMechanic focuses on the on-demand side of things (for requesting auto repair services), Vinted is focused more on the peer-to-peer market.

Vinted is basically a secondhand clothing store where the buyers and sellers are regular people like you and me. If you have an awesome dress that you simply don't wear anymore (for whatever reason), you can create a profile on Vinted, put together a listing for the dress complete with photos and description, and then wait for prospective buyers to check it out.

If another Vintie (the cute name for Vinted users) likes the dress and agrees to the price you've set, then they simply purchase the dress, pay for shipping, and then wait for it to arrive in the mail. Vinted gives the seller a prepaid shipping label, making it easy to send the dress to the buyer.

After the transaction is completed, the seller keeps all the money for the dress, minus a small fee to Vinted:

Have items to sell? Take great pictures, add a killer description, and upload them on Vinted. Swapping and giving an item away is free! We take 19% of the total price from successfully sold items. The minimum amount of this fee is $1, and it’s capped at $5 until the end of 2016.

And that appears to be the fundamental idea behind Vinted's business model. A $1-5 fee on the sale of every item, though the max fee could change at the end of the year. I've reached out to the company to see if there are any other components to the business model that I'm missing, and will update if I hear back.

Today, Vinted has attracted 12 million members, with another 11,000 joining daily. Additionally, the marketplace now has 22.3 million items listed, with 90 new items listed every minute. The company also says an item is sold on the site every 49 seconds.

Doing a little rough math on that last figure would suggest that Vinted sells about a half million items every year. At the median fee of $3, that would mean Vinted makes about $1.5 million every year from its seller fees.

To date, Vinted has 240 people on its team, does business in 11 countries (including the US and several countries in Europe), and has raised approximately $60 million in venture capital.