00:00 Vintage is a startup based out of Vilnius, Lithuania, and they specialize in the resell
00:07 of clothing.
00:08 So they compete with brands like eBay, Poshmark, but they've come to really dominate the sector
00:14 within Europe.
00:15 They've been in operation now since 2008.
00:18 They've had a few different iterations of the business, initially starting for free
00:23 and then trying to move to a kind of Poshmark style model.
00:27 Now in their kind of latest form, they're focused on only charging buyers fees and making
00:32 it free for sellers to operate.
00:34 Nobody has ever sold as much secondhand items as we're doing in a country.
00:39 So the secondhand transactions per capita that we're creating in markets like France,
00:44 Belgium, and the Netherlands is at the level that nowhere in the world has ever been achieved
00:48 before.
00:49 But even at that penetration level, we're still showing very, very strong growth.
00:54 So it's really that we're creating that market by making this product available.
00:59 Also look at the tracking of our competitors.
01:01 It's not that our competitors or secondhand shops are not selling anymore.
01:05 Actually, they're thriving as well.
01:07 Yet we grow all on top of that at a pace that is harder and faster than everybody else.
01:11 And therefore we're creating this new market by making it economically viable and super
01:16 easy to sell and buy secondhand clothing.
01:20 So Vinted is a company that I've been tracking for a while and just have a sort of personal
01:24 metric for how successful they've been.
01:26 Just in terms of my local bodega is a pickup and drop off point for people to send in their
01:33 e-commerce packages and like sort of every week I'm keeping track of just sort of how
01:38 many Vinted parcels were piling up and overtaking Amazon, eBay.
01:43 But also in this time, the kind of the global resale market has really boomed.
01:48 One of the American competitors for Vinted, throw it up as predicting that the kind of
01:51 the global market for secondhand goods is going to grow to like over 350 billion in
01:56 the next couple of years.
01:58 This is kind of partly driven by cost of living and consumers feeling constrained in terms
02:04 of spending.
02:05 Also kind of a generational shift in terms of how people want to shop and consume.
02:11 People are interested in sort of sustainability and also kind of having a unique look.
02:16 And Vinted has been really able to kind of capitalize on this trend and have been particularly
02:20 successful within Europe.
02:26 The US has been stuck on, let's say, the old classic eBay model, which is a 20 percent
02:30 seller fee.
02:31 And what we did is we said, OK, we're going to make that practically four times less expensive
02:36 to 5 percent.
02:37 And we put it on the buy side instead of the sell side, because it's the buyer who gets
02:41 practically the comfort of buying online, the buyer protection, that insurance that
02:45 we give.
02:47 And thereby we let them pay for it.
02:49 And the seller who brings the goods to the table actually doesn't have to pay anything.
02:53 I joined Vinted as a consultant in 2016.
02:57 I then was living in New York and moved here to help out for five weeks.
03:03 That escalated into me becoming the CEO of Vinted and living here now for almost eight
03:07 years.
03:08 I found a lot of young, enthusiastic people really wanted to build something, but a business
03:14 model that was not working.
03:16 I had the right knowledge to make the changes into the business model and how we operate
03:22 to make all that enthusiasm work into the right direction to make it a well-working
03:27 business.
03:30 We don't know how large this is going to be.
03:32 The secondhand transactions per capita that we're creating in markets like France, Belgium
03:37 and the Netherlands is at the level that nowhere in the world has ever been achieved before.
03:42 But even at that penetration level, we're still showing very, very strong growth.
03:46 So it's really that we're creating that market by making this product available.
03:52 The more items you have available to be bought, the higher the probability that somebody will
03:57 find an item that they like.
03:59 If you think about the sustainability element, we do two things very well.
04:03 So majority of our shipping is locker shipping from locker to locker.
04:07 So you pick it up yourself.
04:09 That type of shipping has 62% more CO2 efficiency than home delivery, obviously, because you
04:15 don't have to drive to everybody's home.
04:17 Then what we see is that one in three transactions on our platform avoids the purchase of a new
04:21 item.
04:22 And thereby we see that every transaction on average avoids 1.8 kilograms of CO2 compared
04:29 to buying new items.
04:31 When and whether there will be an IPO depends on many different things.
04:35 As a company, we would be ready for that.
04:37 But what we're trying to do is we try to ensure that we choose the best possible path long
04:42 term for this company.
04:44 IPO is just a way of financing the company and financially structuring it.
04:48 We're just making sure now that we are investing our money in the right things to hold the
04:52 right growth rates and organize ourselves in the right way to achieve our long term
04:56 goals.
04:57 Therefore, I now my title as a group CEO and not just CEO.
05:01 And we have our CEO of Marketplace, Adam Jay, who runs the whole marketplace.
05:05 We have Freetautas who runs the whole shipping division.
05:08 We have Modestas who runs the whole payments division.
05:11 And by creating separate CEOs on each of these divisions, we're creating a system that enables
05:18 us to build an ecosystem of businesses and to build a sustainable long term strong and
05:24 big company in Europe.
05:26 We need to compete with ecosystems that are available in the US and in China.
05:30 We cannot just be a vulnerable single vertical marketplace.
05:34 We have to become an ecosystem of businesses that strengthen each other and thereby takes
05:38 a position that can survive for decades instead of something that will be a fad for the next
05:44 few years.
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