Can Gen Z Really Get Rich with Vinted? A new business model is emerging, tax-free and learnable through an online course

«As a child, I dreamed of playing rugby professionally», Morgan Purnell tells Business Insider. A dream that was shattered when, at 17, he was forced to stop playing due to an injury. Coming across a Google Ads listing, he discovered Vintage Wholesale Supply, a website where you can buy vintage clothing and accessories in bulk. He decided to invest 200 of the 400 pounds he had saved from his part-time job to purchase 50 kg of Ralph Lauren trousers. He started selling them on Vinted and Depop and documenting his journey on TikTok, effectively becoming the logistics hub for an external supplier (and not, as is often the case, for his mum's or grandad's wardrobe), going on to generate, in 2025, over £142,000 in revenue, £85,873 of which from Vinted.

Young entrepreneurs

Calling it a side hustle is an understatement; calling it a shop is certainly premature. The model resembles dropshipping, an online sales model in which products are sold without owning a warehouse or directly managing shipping, with the difference that Morgan Purnell definitively owns the goods he purchases, along with all the associated risks (including the risk of not being able to sell them). It follows the same logic as a flea market, applied at a scale involving millions of users and algorithms that reward those who post continuously. Evan, one of the UK's first full-time vintage resellers, started selling clothes online at the age of 15. By 16, he had already earned his first £10,000 months by listing 30 to 40 items a day, including caps bought for £1 each and sold for five or six times that amount.

A new parallel market

While reselling is certainly nothing new in the fashion market (as demonstrated by the well-known cases of eBay, StockX and the grey markets that fuelled streetstyle culture through the sale of Supreme, BAPE and the like), what makes the difference here is the structure: behind a single sale on Vinted lies a well-oiled supply chain. Evidence of this can be found in courses (such as the one on Udemy, which teaches how to source products online and build relationships with wholesale suppliers), as well as the tutorials and guides created to teach people how to resell.

The cultural climate has certainly helped spread these practices: according to The RealReal's Resale Report 2026, the colossal secondhand luxury marketplace, demand for vintage items on the platform has grown by 432% since 2020, and more than half of its customers are Gen Z and Millennials, who increasingly consider pre-owned luxury their first choice. The same report indicates that 47% of consumers consider the potential resale value of an item before buying it on the primary market: the tendency to buy with an eye already on resale is so deeply ingrained that it is present even at the moment of first purchase, which is normally driven by other factors (genuine need, desire, impulse).

The famous «Vintage Dressing»

It is impossible to detect the practice of buying and reselling on the platform, as it is not flagged in private sellers' listings, which represents a significant ethical problem. Vinted was created as a space for non-professional consumers and sellers, and those operating as professionals are supposed to register as a Pro seller, indicated by a label next to the account name. In a listing for an item, however, it is never specified whether it comes from the seller's own wardrobe or from a batch purchased wholesale, let alone how much the selling price has been marked up relative to the purchase price.

It is much the same grey area in which the buying and selling of items often listed under the label Vintage Dressing, Vintage Love or simply Vintage takes place — items that are in fact purchased from Shein or other e-commerce platforms at a considerably lower price. Unfortunately, the practice is not criminally prosecutable: at best, you can only seek a refund for your purchase.

And what about taxes?

As far as bulk selling itself is concerned, since 2023 the European DAC7 directive has required platforms to collect data on their most active sellers and report it to the tax authorities. This monitoring is triggered by at least thirty sales or more than €2,000 within a calendar year. The report, however, goes to the fiscal authorities, not to buyers, and from the outside, a profile selling hundreds of items a year looks no different from a cleared-out wardrobe. On the platform's Help Centre page, it is made clear that there is no taxation on items sold through Vinted, «even if you have sold the items at a higher price than you originally paid for them (i.e. you are making a profit from your sales)». This applies to occasional sales, not to the regular sales of Pro sellers.

But let us return to the wardrobe. For years, reselling on Vinted has been the go-to solution for those wanting to free up space, recoup a few euros and try not to burden the environment. For a portion of Gen Z, it has become a profession, complete with suppliers, stock and tutorials. The question at this point is not so much about the young people doing what the market allows, but about who sets the rules: where does the flea market end and the shop begin?