London's Link and Lace

Revenue rose 38 percent, profit fell by nearly a fifth, and a survey of 100,000 members found that eight in ten use the site to buy things they could not otherwise afford

If you want to understand what is happening to the British clothes shop, it helps to start with a number that has nothing to do with Britain. Vinted, the second-hand marketplace, reported 2025 revenue of 1.1 billion euros, about 960 million pounds, up 38 percent on 2024. Users traded 10.8 billion euros of goods, about 9.4 billion pounds. The Express & Star report, published on 14 April 2026, is clear that this is a global figure and does not break out the UK on its own. Even so, the direction is plain: people are buying one another’s clothes in very large numbers.

Profit Did Not Keep Up

The odd part of the results is that more revenue did not produce more profit. Net profit was 62 million euros, about 54 million pounds, nearly a fifth lower than the previous year. Adjusted EBITDA was 151 million euros, down 5 percent. Vinted put this down to investment: turning round its German business, widening the categories sold on the platform, and launching in-house shipping in Spain and Portugal. It also launched in Latvia, Estonia and Slovenia in 2025.

That is a pattern London retailers will recognise from their own accounts. Growth costs money, and platform growth costs it earlier than anyone would like. Chief executive Thomas Plantenga set out the aim in the company’s own words: ‘we need to be the most cost-efficient, be the most reliable and easy to use’ to make second-hand the first choice, and to ‘drive the future consumption shift from new to second-hand.’ It is an ambitious sentence from a company that has just seen profit fall.

How the Money Is Made

For readers who have only sold a jumper or two, the revenue model is worth spelling out. According to the report, buyers pay a protection fee of roughly 3 to 8 percent of an item’s price plus a fixed fee per order, and sellers can pay for listing boosts called bumps. Deliveries in the UK go through partner firms Evri, Royal Mail and InPost. The business does not own a single warehouse of stock; it earns when someone else’s wardrobe changes hands. A shop that holds inventory carries the risk of unsold goods. A marketplace carries the risk of nobody turning up.

The Primark Comparison

The comparison that made British headlines was with the high street’s price champion. In June 2023, the data specialist CACI’s analysis, reported by RetailDetail, found that Vinted’s UK sales had grown eightfold in about eighteen months, a rise of 680 percent, and that monthly transactions had risen from 900,000 to one million between March and April 2023. When only electronic payments were counted, Vinted overtook Primark in March and April that year. The report itself notes the limits: the survey excludes cash payments at Primark, which should not be underestimated.

That caveat deserves to travel with the claim. The headline made it sound as though a phone app had beaten the biggest name in cheap clothing. The accurate version is that, among cashless transactions across 300 UK brands, the app had caught up. That is still a remarkable result for a company that most British shoppers had not heard of a few years earlier, and the report added that the platform was attracting increasingly affluent consumers. It is a few years old now, and anyone relying on it for a current market share should look for a newer figure.

Why Shoppers Say They Do It

The best survey evidence comes from Vinted itself, and it comes with a clear caution. As just-style’s explainer reports, the company surveyed 100,000 members in Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands, with analysis from the climate tech start-up Vaayu. Britain was not among the countries surveyed, so the findings are suggestive for London rather than direct. They are also commissioned by the platform, so they should be read as the view of people who already use it.

With that said, the numbers are striking. Eight in ten users said the site lets them buy items they could not otherwise afford. Nineteen percent said they use it because they see resale as the right thing to do, and 20 percent said they would still buy second-hand if prices matched new. Sixty-five percent said they prefer fewer, more expensive items to more, cheaper ones, and 84 percent said second-hand items are the same or better quality than new. Thirty-seven percent said second-hand makes up half or more of their wardrobe. Thirty-six percent said they take better care of clothes because they can resell them.

The same article cites the waste charity WRAP in finding 1.6 billion unworn items in UK wardrobes, which is the supply side of the whole business. A country with that much unworn clothing does not need to manufacture a great deal more; it needs a way to move what it has.

What London’s Shops Do About It

For a city that sells clothes for a living, the resale boom is both a threat and an opening. It is a threat to the mid-priced chain whose customer can now buy a near-identical item for a fraction of the price. It is an opening to the independent vintage trader, who has been selling used clothes with a point of view for decades. Our guide to London’s vintage clothing scene makes the case that the city has always treated old clothes as a good source of new style, and our look at sustainable fashion in London covers the wider argument that the greenest garment is the one already made.

There is also a quirky local tradition worth remembering. The shops that sell by the kilo, the markets, the charity rails and the dressing-up boxes of the East End all pre-date the app. Our short piece on London rag fashion follows that thread. What Vinted has done is not invent a habit but put a logistics network under it.

The Fair Reading

None of this means the high street is finished. The just-style explainer itself describes second-hand as a segment that remains a very small part of the fashion market, even while it grows. Vinted’s own profit fell last year. And the environmental claims, such as the saving of about 1.25 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per second-hand purchase, come from an analysis the company commissioned, in which emissions per delivery also rose between 2021 and 2023, which Vinted attributes in part to a change in the calculation models. A sensible shopper can take the savings seriously and still ask who did the sums.

The practical message for anyone running a London clothes business is modest. Customers now compare your price with the price of the same item, worn once, on a phone. Quality matters because it holds resale value. And the shops that survive will be the ones that can say something a listing cannot.

For more on how the city shops and sells, see our London business and news guide, and for the wider magazine visit Bohiney Magazine. If you want a lighter angle on the second-hand habit, NewsBiscuit is the sort of place where a lightly worn coat is always a story. As for your own wardrobe, the most useful figure in this whole column may be the one about unworn clothes: somewhere in your house there is probably an item with the tags still on, waiting for a buyer.

SOURCE: bohiney.com