Vinted Merge
Company
Year
My role
Vinted
2021
Main Design stakeholder
"Make second-hand first choice worldwide"
Vinted’s mission
What it means for sellers?
Enable sellers to sell second-hand items effectively
What it means for buyers?
Enable buyers to find large variety of second-hand items
Problem
A seller in Berlin couldn’t sell to a buyer in Paris. With 13 separate apps, every feature was built 13 times and every market stayed an island, which put the setup directly at odds with Vinted’s global mission.
Merging them was the only way forward. For users, though, it meant a new name, a new app and a new community they never asked for, and a bad migration risked losing their trust.
Objective
Unite all 13 platforms into one Vinted, with one account, one catalogue and one community trading across borders, without losing the users who built it.
The challenge
Nothing about this merge could be forced. It only worked if millions of people chose to do something unusual: download a new app, then delete the one they’d trusted for years. Every user who didn’t make the switch was a user we could lose.
For many, the change went deeper than an app. In Germany, for example, people had never heard of Vinted. They knew us as Kleiderkreisel. Parents were losing their dedicated kids’ app too, so the place they shopped for their children would merge into one marketplace with everything else.
And all of it happened with real money on the line. Balances, open orders and sales in progress all had to survive the move. One lost payout could break someone’s trust for good.
So how do you make that sound exciting to 50 million people?
Building confidence to migrate
50 million users
Where do we test the waters? ➀
Before asking millions of people to move, we needed a starting point. Comparing each market’s users and competitors showed us where we could learn fast without much to lose.
What’s standing in our way? ➁
Shipping and payments ran through partners that varied from country to country, so we had to know which doors were easiest to open before trying to walk through them.
Germany first:
the market with the most to gain
We assessed every market on four criteria: size, growth potential, merge value and strategic urgency. Germany stood out on all four. With 12 million monthly active users, it offered the widest reach, yet few Germans used escrow-protected payments, so connecting them with France could show them a safer way to buy. It was also the only market split across two apps, Kleiderkreisel and Mamikreisel, which meant merging would give users a bigger, richer marketplace in one place. And with fierce local competition and a brand name used nowhere else, waiting would only have cost us more. Germany was where the merge could make the biggest difference.
Cross-functional workshops
Alignment & Service blueprint:
How can this work?
We brought business, product and engineering leads together to align on why we were merging, what users would gain, and what the technical path looked like. The result was a shared value proposition and a merge strategy that every team could stand behind.
Dependency mapping:
What depends on what?
Every country ran slightly differently: languages, clothing sizes, currencies, shipping carriers, legal terms and payment methods. We mapped each dependency across markets so nothing would break for users once they landed in the new app. My role was to coordinate the teams behind each one and keep the end-to-end experience seamless.
Pre-mortem and pilot planning:
How do we know it works?
This wasn’t a feature we could A/B test. It was a one-way move for millions of accounts. So we ran a pre-mortem: we imagined the migration had failed and worked backwards to find out why. That surfaced the riskiest areas (balances, open orders and account data) and shaped a controlled pilot to prove the process before scaling it.
The complex flow with 130+ screens mapped out to
5 key user journey steps
The seemingly simple final flow encompassed all areas of the company, leading to updates in approximately 130 screens of Vinted's interface.
01.
The invitation
We couldn’t move everyone at once, so the merge rolled out gradually to a growing share of users. As soon as it was switched on for someone, they were invited to migrate and could start from several places in the app or on the web, wherever they happened to be.
02.
Why it’s worth it
Once users started the migration, they landed on a page that answered the big question first: what’s in it for me? It laid out the benefits of the new Vinted, walked through what would happen step by step, and tackled common worries in an FAQ, so no one had to switch on blind faith.
03.
Taking everything with them
Before anything moved, users were asked to agree to transferring their data. This was a legal requirement, but we designed it as a moment of reassurance: a clear summary of what would come with them, so nothing in the new app would come as a surprise.
04.
Getting the new app
This was the one step we couldn’t make invisible. The local apps were published under separate company accounts, so they couldn’t simply be swapped for Vinted behind the scenes. Users had to download the new app themselves. We made this step as clear and quick as possible, because it was the moment we were most likely to lose people.
05.
Arriving in the new Vinted
Downloading the app was only half the journey. Moving each user’s data took time, so instead of leaving people staring at an empty account, we let them dive straight into the full Vinted experience while keeping them updated on their migration. They could browse a whole new international catalogue while their own wardrobe caught up.
The merge, simplified
A simplified view of the happy path. The real flow branched into many more scenarios, because no two users arrived with the same history.
Merge. Test. Learn. Repeat.
You can't take 50 million people lightly
We tested the flow before launch through moderated and unmoderated sessions, iterating until users could understand, trust and complete it. But testing didn’t stop at launch. After each market merged, we went back to users to learn what worked and what didn’t, and carried those lessons into the next migration. Every merge made the next one better.
Merge results
13 merges. 13 wins.
Across all 13 merges, we met or exceeded our primary OKRs. Users made the switch, kept trading and stayed with us, and the communities we were afraid of losing became part of one international marketplace.
130 s
Average time to migrate. Consent, data transfer, download and arrival took most users about two minutes. Keeping it short kept people from dropping off at the riskiest steps.
87%
of users completed the migration.
We were asking people to download a new app and leave behind one they trusted. The vast majority made the move, proof that the value proposition and reassurance landed.
~73%
rated the experience positively
For a change nobody asked for, most users came away happy. Testing before and after each merge helped us remove friction one market at a time.
