Summary
This B2 business English lesson focuses on the success of the e-commerce platform Vinted. Students begin with a warm-up discussion about second-hand shopping, then learn key business vocabulary. They watch a video about Vinted's rise and answer comprehension questions. The lesson includes practice with business phrases, a grammar focus on describing trends, and culminates in a discussion about business models and a creative role-play where students pitch their own startup idea.
Activities
- Warm-up and vocabulary: Students begin by discussing their experiences with the second-hand economy. They then learn and practice key business terms like 'startup,' 'viable,' and 'ecosystem' through a matching exercise to prepare for the video topic.
- Video comprehension: Based on a video about the second-hand clothing platform Vinted, students will answer comprehension questions that explore its business model, growth drivers, shipping logistics, and long-term goals for success.
- Business phrases and role-play: Students complete sentences using common business phrases like 'capitalize on trends' and 'achieve long-term goals.' The lesson concludes with a creative role-play where they pitch their own e-commerce startup to investors.
Vinted is a startup based out of Vilnius, Lithuania, and they specialize in the resell of clothing. So they compete with brands like eBay Poshmark, but they've come to really dominate the sector within Europe.
They've been in operation now since 2008. They've had a few different iterations of the business, initially starting for free and then trying to move to a kind of Poshmark style model.
Now in their kind of latest form, they're focused on only charging buyers fees and making it free for sellers to operate.
Nobody has ever sold as much second-hand items as we're doing in a country. So the second-hand transactions per capita that we're creating in markets like France, Belgium, and the Netherlands is at the level that nowhere in the world has ever been achieved before.
But even at that penetration level, we're still showing very, very strong growth. So it's really that we're creating that market by making this product available.
Also, look at the tracking of our competitors. It's not that our competitors or second-hand shops are not selling anymore, actually they're thriving as well.
Yet we grow all on top of that at a pace that is harder, faster than everybody else, and thereby we're creating this new market by making it economically viable and super easy to sell and buy second-hand clothing.
So Vinted is a company that I've been tracking for a while, and just I have a sort of personal metric for how successful they've been, just in terms of my local BEDA.
It is a pickup and drop off point for people to send in their e-commerce packages, and like sort of every week I kept keeping track of just sort of how many Vinted parcels were piling up and overtaking Amazon, eBay.
But also in this time, the kind of the global resale market has really boomed.
One of the American competitors for Vinted, ThredUp, is predicting that the global market for second-handers is going to grow to like over 350 billion in the next couple of years.
This is kind of partly driven by cost of living and consumers feeling constrained in terms of their spending.
Also, kind of a generational shift in terms of how people want to shop and consume. People are interested in sort of sustainability and also kind of having a unique look.
And Vinted has been really able to kind of capitalize on the trends and have been particularly successful within Europe.
The US has been stuck on, let's say, the old classic eBay model, which is a 20% seller fee. And what we did is we said, okay, we're going to make that practically four times less expensive to 5%, and we put it on the buy side instead of the sell side.
Because it's the buyer who gets practically the comfort of buying online, the buyer protection, that insurance that we give. And thereby we let them pay for it, and the seller who brings the goods to the table actually doesn't have to pay anything.
I joined Vinted as a consultant in 2016. I then was living in New York and moved here to help out for 5 weeks, and that escalated into me becoming the CEO of Vinted and living here now for almost 8 years.
I found a lot of young enthusiastic people really wanted to build something, but a business model that was not working. I had the right knowledge to make the changes into the business model and how we operate to make all that enthusiasm work into the right direction to make it a well-working business.
We don't know how large this is going to be. The second-hand transactions per capita that we're creating in markets like France, Belgium, and the Netherlands is at the level that nowhere in the world has ever been achieved before.
But even at that penetration level, we're still showing very, very strong growth. So it's really that we're creating that market by making this product available.
The more items you have available to be bought, the higher the probability that somebody will find an item that they like.
If you think about the sustainability element, we do two things very well. So majority of our shipping is Locker shipping from Locker to Locker. So you pick it up yourself.
That type of shipping has 62% more CO2 efficiency than home delivery, obviously because you don't have to drive to everybody's home.
Then what we see is that one intra-state transactions on our platform avoids the purchase of a new item, and thereby we see that every transaction on average avoids 1.8 kg of CO2 compared to buying new items.
When and whether there will be an IPO depends on many different things. As a company, we would be ready for that, but what we're trying to do is we try to ensure that we choose the best possible path long term for this company.
IPO is just a way of financing the company and financially structuring it. We're just making sure now that we are investing our money in the right things to hold the right growth place and organize ourselves in the right way to achieve our long-term goals.
Therefore, I now my title is Group CEO and not just CEO, and we have our CEO of Marketplace, Adam J, who runs the whole Marketplace. We have Fas who runs the whole shipping division. We have Modestas who runs the whole payments division.
And by creating separate CEOs on each of these divisions, we're creating a system that enables us to build an ecosystem of businesses and to build a sustainable, long-term, strong and big company.
In Europe, we need to compete with ecosystems that are available in the US and in China. We cannot just be a vulnerable single vertical Marketplace. We have to become an ecosystem of businesses that strengthen each other and thereby takes a position that can survive for decades instead of something that will be a sad for the next few years.
Vocabulary focus
The lesson introduces essential business and economic vocabulary. Key terms include words for business development like 'startup,' 'thrive,' and 'viable,' as well as strategic concepts such as 'dominate,' 'capitalize on,' and 'ecosystem.' Phrases for describing success like 'create a new market' and 'a generational shift' are also practiced, providing students with the language to discuss modern business trends.
Grammar focus
The grammar section concentrates on using the Present Perfect and Present Continuous tenses to accurately describe business performance and market trends. Students will learn when to use the Present Perfect for recent changes (e.g., 'The market has boomed') and the Present Continuous for current, active trends (e.g., 'We are showing strong growth'), solidifying their understanding through a gap-fill exercise.
Vinted: The rise of a second-hand unicorn
