We turned Vinted into a powerful medium to promote clothing donations to Emmaüs, instead of selling items online. With zero budget for media promotion, we creatively repurposed Vinted's listings as solidarity billboards, calling on users to donate their clothes. Our innovative approach has transformed Vinted into a social aid platform, encouraging people to show their generosity by contributing to Emmaüs.

Since the emergence of second-hand platforms, such as Vinted, French people are donating fewer and fewer clothes to charities. At Emmaüs France, we've relied on clothing donations for 70 years to raise funds and help people in need. And without these donations, the association's entire model is threatened. With a limited budget, how can we incentivize people to donate their clothes to Emmaüs instead of selling them on Vinted ? Simply by communicating in the most strategic place: directly on Vinted, the largest second-hand sales platform in France. And as we hijacked it, it's free!

To reach Vinted’s users and encourage them to donate rather than sell what they no longer wear, we designed hundreds of items (such as t-shirts, shirts, sweatshirts, bags, jackets, etc) by twisting the Vinted tagline "Don't wear it? Sell it!" into "Don't wear it? Give it!" We posted these items as regular listings on the platform, (using the fake profile Emma_Us), turning them into virtual billboards calling for clothing donations. Then, we let the algorithm do the work. Nothing was for sale; instead, each item invited users to donate clothes to Emmaüs. For the first time, we used Vinted as a real advertising medium, without any budget.

Our campaign mainly targeted young French people who are donating fewer and fewer clothes and prefer to sell them online what they no longer wear. To call for clothing donations, we decided to communicate directly on the largest second-hand sales platform: Vinted. With no media budget, we used the listings ads as virtual billboards to encourage clothing donations.

We creatively hijacked the Vinted France platform by using hundreds of items as virtual billboards to call for clothing donations. We designed these items by rephrasing Vinted's tagline, "Don't wear it? Sell it!" to "Don't wear it? Give it!" and posted them online as real listings on our profile “Emma_Us”. We conducted this operation in March 2023, after the winter sales, on Vinted, the largest second-hand sales platform in France. The campaign lasted for 24 hours before Vinted removed all our posts from the platform.

65 Million impressions

2 Million reach

+ 19% of clothing donation intentions

0 euros media budget

+ 250 media appearances (the biggest national TV and national newspapers)

- more than 50 influencers & KOL’s talks about the Emmaüs activation

Social networks welcomed the idea with great enthusiasm, as people realized the importance of clothing donation for an association like Emmaus. Especially in comparison to the complexity that a sale on Vinted can entail.

In France, Vinted is the biggest second-hand sales platform, used by 23 million French people, mostly young people.