When I first moved to the UK, I fell hard and fast for Vinted, the Lithuanian-born secondhand fashion app with a lo-fi user experience and pleasingly uncool branding. It’s cheap, quick and addictive: behind its innocuous teal logo is an algorithm uncannily attuned to your desires, surfacing one compelling listing after another.
Vinted launched in Australia on 1 July, giving secondhand buyers and sellers access to a far larger pool of clothing and customers than the domestic resale market can offer. It quickly became one of the country’s most downloaded apps, according to Australia’s iTunes charts.
It’s been “a really encouraging start,” Guen de Mello, the platform’s communications manager, tells Guardian Australia. “We’ve been very pleased with how members have taken to Vinted here, and the early response says a lot about the appetite for secondhand in the market.”
A study undertaken in June by Vinted in partnership with Pureprofile showed that 91% of Australians have bought or sold secondhand, and more than half (52%) of sellers listed more items in the past year than they had the year before. The Australian “recommerce” market continues to grow, with Research and Markets estimating it will reach US$6.75bn (A$9.56bn) by 2029.
SJ Keats, a longtime buyer and seller on platforms including Depop, eBay and Whatnot, says Vinted’s arrival is “a genuine gamechanger”. In the month since it landed, she’s been active on the app, buying a pair of boots, flared jeans, and pieces for her kids. Her best find? A handbag that she originally bought for $100 and wanted to replace. “I recently found two in different colours on Vinted for just $10 each,” says Keats, who is based in Perth.
It’s also attractively cheap. Listing is free on the platform, so sellers keep all their earnings. In contrast with the more professionalised storefronts on Depop, most sellers seem to be looking to “make a quick bit of cash”, says Keats, “which keeps prices refreshingly low”. Vinted’s first three listings in Australia were a black cotton dress ($10), a pair of black jeans ($30) and a high-waisted pair of blue jeans ($35).
Competitors are taking notice. On 22 July, Depop removed its selling fees for Australians, following eBay – which bought the platform in February – which did the same in May.
Melbourne-based Lily Johnston, a postgraduate fashion business student, has made four purchases since Vinted launched in Australia – one of them from me. For her, the app has become an unlikely forecasting tool, allowing her to track trends emerging in the UK and Europe and bet on which ones will eventually make their way to Australia.
But some have questioned the sustainability credentials of opening the marketplace to Australia, pointing to the carbon cost of shipping relatively low-value items to the other side of the world. Johnston saw that tension first-hand when a UK seller accepted her order before deciding they weren’t “comfortable” posting it to Australia. They cancelled the sale.
Amy, a Vinted user from Falkirk in Scotland, has similar hesitations. The platform doesn’t currently offer a way of filtering searches by country, so overseas listings are mixed in with local results and recommendations. Amy, who joined the platform partly for environmental reasons, says this undermines one of resale’s biggest selling points. “As a buyer wanting to reduce my carbon footprint, there’s no way I’d buy from an international seller,” she says.
For Amy, the Australian launch reflects a wider shift. She says Vinted has become increasingly saturated with fast fashion while pieces listed as “vintage” are sometimes new and mass-produced. It “used to be a good alternative to charity shops,” she says, but with the influx of international and low quality items, it’s become harder to navigate.
Whether those trade offs matter will depend on what users want and are willing to forgo for a bargain. For Australia’s ravenous secondhand shoppers, access to millions of overseas listings is a clear draw. For some longtime UK users, the expansion has muddied a platform they once saw as a low-impact alternative. As the company grows, with the US market next on the horizon, it may just find that attracting new users is easier than keeping its earliest ones happy.
