It started with the viral Leopard Print Puffer Coat from George at ASDA. RRP £38; average Vinted fee £75. Now, it’s Marks & Spencer’s Utility Trucker Jacket, often accompanied by a price tag reading upwards of £80. Once a gaggle of Mary Portas wannabes, we’ve now got aspiring Alan Sugars crowding Vinted. Long gone are the days of bagging a bargain — now, it’s an elitist sport in favour of the competitor with the biggest wallet. Or a willingness to overlook the original price online.
Humblebrag, but I’ve been through the buying and selling process more than 490 times in the last three years. Selling both my mother’s and my wardrobe leftovers, I like to think that I’ve mostly been fair with my pricing. Something unworn, with tags? Uploaded at what I paid, with a willingness to take (reasonable) offers. Everything else then listed with a decent reduction considering it had been worn once, maybe twice. But it seems this sentiment doesn’t extend across the entire Vinted sisterhood.
Last month, when quizzing a fellow seller on why she wouldn’t take any less than £75 for the supermarket GANNI dupe, the gatekeeper of the prized padded jacket wrote: “How am I meant to become the next Alan Sugar if I don’t make a profit?”
I’ve got no shame in admitting that before Vinted, I wasn’t a preloved fan. Having grown up in a small village with one singular charity shop and residents mostly aged 80-plus, it was slim pickings. But the online marketplace has given me access to brands — namely Anthropologie, & Other Stories, COS and Aligne — that have previously sat outside of my budget, with pieces often in near-perfect condition.
But now, I, and hundreds of other Vinted regulars, are being encouraged to return to the high street when seeking items from our wish lists in a bid to get them at a reasonable price.
A quick recap: The site was founded in Lithuania back in 2008 by Justas Janauskas after his friend Milda Mitkute announced she was moving and needed to give away some clothes. A small idea then became one of the leading preloved platforms, the eco-conscious praising the app for limiting waste and reducing the demand on high street retailers. In 2023 alone, Vinted members helped avoid 679 kilotonnes of CO2 by buying second-hand instead of new.
Another finding during the 2024 study? Vinted members’ primary motivation for buying something secondhand rather than new was because it’s ‘great value for money,’ with almost half (48%) claiming they chose to buy a gently-used item because the price was lower. So what’s changed in recent months?
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