Thomas Plantenga

Plantenga was born in the Netherlands. He earned a master’s degree in engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, studied fluid dynamics in his undergraduate and master’s degrees, and was trained as a biophysicist. He has said that what he actually learned in his studies was how to break a complex, hard-to-predict system into smaller problems and then turn it into a predictable model; he compares users’ behavior in a product to fluid flowing through blood vessels.⁠[1][1][2][2][2][2]

In 2010, Plantenga and a classmate from Eindhoven University of Technology founded Bookaboat, a boat rental marketplace, and that same year he joined the consultancy Harvest, marking his entry into consumer marketplaces and corporate turnarounds. Bookaboat achieved only modest success but put him on the radar of the classifieds platform OLX.⁠[2][1][1]

In 2013, Harvest was acquired by the global classifieds platform OLX, where Plantenga took on a leadership role overseeing strategy in emerging markets and was sent to places including Argentina, Kenya, and Dubai to help build revenue.⁠[2][1]

In 2014, Fabrice Grinda, co-founder of OLX and FJ Labs, recruited Plantenga to help launch Sell It, a mobile-first classifieds startup. In November 2015, the Spanish secondhand app Wallapop acquired Sell It in a share deal and brought him on to lead Wallapop’s US expansion.⁠[2][1][2]

In May 2016, Plantenga, who was living in New York and working on projects with Grinda, received an invitation from Insight Venture Partners to help Vinted, a struggling Lithuanian secondhand clothing platform in its portfolio. He joined Vinted as a consultant for a five-week engagement and on arrival found the problems more serious than expected: a 20% seller commission the company had just introduced was driving users away, and at that rate it would go out of business within 9 to 12 months.⁠[3][3][2][2][2][2][2]

During those five weeks, he connected with the two co-founders and wrote an aggressive plan to completely change the company’s direction, then moved to Vilnius and never returned to New York. He has said he did not invest money in the company but rather his time and work. The changes included layoffs, closing every office except the headquarters, scrapping the seller commission in favor of a buyer protection fee, merging the national apps, and running a large-scale television and digital advertising campaign. He later recalled that as an outsider he could view the situation without emotion, and had told management that if they continued like this the company would be dead in nine months; the experience of laying off hardworking employees made him insist on strict financial discipline from then on.⁠[3][2][4][4][2][2][5][5][5]

In November 2017, after about a year and a half working as a consultant, Plantenga took over as CEO of Vinted with the co-founders’ agreement. He has said that his first goal at the time was simply to make the company financially sustainable and reach break-even.⁠[1][2][2]

After Vinted completed a €50 million financing in 2018, Plantenga said that Depop was good at branding itself as a seller of “cool” clothing, whereas Vinted sold everybody’s clothes and did not care whether they were cool; he said he stayed because he believed secondhand clothing would become a very big business.⁠[3][3]

In 2021, after Plantenga announced ambitious expansion plans, Insight managing director Deven Parekh urged caution. Plantenga recalled that Parekh warned him not to burn all the money because the financial markets were about to collapse, and the company adjusted its plan accordingly to become financially independent without relying on new funding; the financial markets then collapsed and the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, and the company was shielded from the shock by its conservative budget.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

In June 2022, Vinted restructured its group: Adam Jay became CEO of the Vinted Marketplace, Plantenga became CEO of Vinted Group, and the shipping brand Vinted Go was launched. In July of that year, Vinted made an offer to acquire the German secondhand luxury platform RebelleRebelleRebelle was a secondhand luxury and designer fashion marketplace founded in Hamburg, Germany, in 2013, which authenticated items and handled payment and shipping on sellers’ behalf. It listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market in Stockholm in February 2022, was acquired and delisted the same year by the Lithuanian secondhand marketplace Vinted, and ceased independent operation after being merged into Vinted in 2024.Open the full entry, which he said he had been following for several years.⁠[6][6][7]

In April 2024, Plantenga said that Vinted was making bets in shipping, payments, and new markets, and that staying private meant not having to constantly explain itself to outsiders or chase quarterly targets; the company would stay private “for the foreseeable future.” He described the US secondhand market as “immature” and said fashion items priced above €1,000 were the fastest-growing category at the time; when the company reported its first annual profit, he said secondhand fashion was still a relatively immature market and only a tiny proportion of fashion overall.⁠[8][5][5][1][1]

In October 2024, Vinted completed a secondary share sale led by TPG at a valuation of €5 billion. Plantenga said the transaction rewarded employees for their dedication and showed that it is possible to run a profitable business that has a positive impact on people, communities, and the environment.⁠[9][9]

In June 2025, Plantenga said he wanted to turn Vinted into the “Amazon of secondhand,” where people could buy and sell any secondhand consumer goods on a single platform; he said success lay in doing “the unsexy things,” such as shaving cent after cent off the cost of sending a parcel and running its own servers instead of more expensive cloud services. He also said that cracking the US market would be tremendous.⁠[2][2][2]

In April 2026, Vinted completed a secondary share sale corresponding to an equity valuation of €8 billion. Plantenga said the transaction reflected the company’s progress in embedding its marketplace in its own shipping and payments infrastructure, and that online secondhand trade was growing faster than e-commerce overall; he had also begun testing cross-Atlantic trade routes between London and New York, and still described the US secondhand market as “immature.”⁠[10][10][11]

Plantenga has summed up his career by saying there was always a boss who asked him to solve a problem. He believes scaling requires allocating capital through analytics rather than gut feeling, and stresses that Vinted must be the most cost-efficient, most reliable, and easiest to use; he wants Vinted to be always available, like turning on a tap, and to become part of society’s infrastructure. Parekh has described his model as “completely testing-based.”⁠[2][5][12][2][2]

He attributed Vinted’s 2024 profit to strict cost control, building complex infrastructure in-house, and innovating to bring new services to scale.⁠[13]