‘Give every item a long life’: Vinted boss on how the site is moving beyond fashion

Having shaken up UK clothes retail, the secondhand marketplace is pushing into phones and cameras – and even books Once the preserve of jumble sales and charity shops, “preloved” fashion and homewares are now leading style and shopping trends in the UK. After the rapid growth of online retail, Britain is now witnessing “the normalisation of secondhand”, according to Adam Jay, the chief executive of Vinted’s main marketplace arm – a key driver of the trend in recent years. The UK is at the forefront of an international revolution, jostling for position with France to be Vinted’s biggest market, and is also one of its fastest growing markets, as the online marketplace moves beyond just selling clothes and into everything from smartphones and books to rugs. “I see a deep and sustained change in how people buy and how people think about things that they own,” says Jay, who has been in the job since 2022. “We’re a very meaningful part, now, of UK fashion, and we’re becoming a very meaningful part of the retail scene in other categories as well,” he says. He says in the last five to 10 years Britons have embraced secondhand buying to a far greater degree, boos