Vinted

The Starting Point

Two beloved German platforms — Kleiderkreisel and Mamikreisel, each with deeply loyal communities — were being folded into a single new identity. The risk was real: millions of members who didn't ask for a rebrand, a media landscape primed for scepticism, and a platform whose entire value rests on trust. The task wasn't simply to announce a new name. It was to protect what had already been built — and use the moment to build something stronger.

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What We Did‍

Brand Merger: From Kleiderkreisel & Mamikreisel to Vinted

The central communications challenge was one of perception: how do you tell nine million German members that everything has changed, while making them feel that nothing essential has been lost? The answer was sequencing. Rather than leading with the new brand, we started three months before the rebranding by amplifying the founding history of Kleiderkreisel and Mamikreisel — grounding the story in continuity before introducing change.

Selected exclusives and interviews were placed ahead of launch day to establish the narrative before media could define it themselves. An extensive Q&A was developed to prepare for the volume and sharpness of incoming questions, with C-level statements positioned across all relevant verticals — consumer, tech, and business press. Messaging was carefully crafted to make clear this was a merger, not an acquisition, and that the community members had helped build was not being handed to someone else.

Following the launch, ongoing storytelling reinforced Vinted's positioning as the go-to platform for secondhand in the DACH region — building trust not just in the new brand name, but in the platform's broader mission around sustainability and circular fashion. In parallel, we developed both B2B and B2C messaging to strengthen awareness of Vinted's buyer protection system, giving members and press alike a concrete reason to trust the transaction layer of the platform.

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Ongoing Brand & Lifestyle Communications

With the merger established, the work shifted to building Vinted's long-term narrative in DACH through proactive storytelling. This meant developing a steady cadence of consumer-facing content — connecting secondhand culture to fashion trends, sustainability conversations, and lifestyle relevance — while managing a consistent flow of inbound media requests across consumer and trade press. Openers handled both the proactive pipeline and the reactive workload, ensuring Vinted's voice in the market remained coherent, credible, and timely.

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Employer Branding

Alongside the consumer and corporate communications work, we also took on Vinted's employer branding in DACH — with a specific focus on attracting tech talent and giving visibility to the company behind the marketplace. The goal was to make Vinted legible as an employer of choice in a competitive hiring landscape, telling the story of the organisation, its culture, and its ambitions beyond the product.

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Crisis Communications: Scams, Safety & Reputation Management

As C2C platforms grew in popularity — accelerated significantly during the pandemic — they also became targets. Scam mechanisms of increasing sophistication began affecting platforms across the category, and Vinted, as the most prominent name in the German market, received more inbound press requests on safety and fraud topics than any other market globally. The German media's appetite for consumer protection stories is sharp, and the topics were serious: triangulation fraud, outdated tracking links, harassment between members, and questions about the integrity of the payment system.

Our approach combined reactive precision with proactive strategy. On the reactive side, we established an efficient inbound management system — aligning quickly across legal, customer support, data, and communications stakeholders to respond within deadline, every time. Relationships with the journalists most likely to cover these topics were cultivated deliberately, enabling faster, more informed dialogue when stories broke.

On the proactive side, we built a strategy to get ahead of the safety narrative rather than simply respond to it. This included a consumer safety campaign that connected practical shopping tips with positive lifestyle angles — organically embedding guidance on how to buy and sell safely into content that audiences actually wanted to read. Trend stories and safety information became one and the same, rather than two separate tracks.

The result: over years of sustained pressure on one of the most scrutinised platforms in the German media landscape, Vinted maintained a consistently neutral to positive coverage tonality. Negative reporting was mitigated repeatedly. The platform's reputation for buyer protection was actively reinforced rather than left to defend itself.

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What We Have Moved

After some years of our partnership, Vinted is the undisputed go-to platform for secondhand in DACH — a position built not just through product, but through communication. A brand merger that could have fractured community trust instead became a foundation for growth. A crisis communications environment that was among the most demanding in the category was managed with a consistency that protected the platform's reputation year after year. And consumer goods of all categories became fun to work with – in all types of media but also in real life via shootings, seedings and activations we created as part of our collaboration.

What the work demonstrated above all: in a category where trust is the product, communications isn't a support function — it's a core part of what makes the business work.

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