{"id":7055681,"date":"2026-09-03T09:05:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T09:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/angel-investor\/dutch-startup-changemakers-thijs-verheul\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T09:05:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T09:05:29","slug":"dutch-startup-changemakers-thijs-verheul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7055681","title":{"rendered":"Dutch Startup Changemakers: Thijs Verheul"},"content":{"rendered":"


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At the age of 20, <\/span>Thijs Verheul<\/span><\/a> founded United Wardrobe, a social marketplace designed for buying and selling fashion items. On October 27th 2020 the company was officially sold to <\/span>Vinted<\/span><\/a>. Thijs is writing a <\/span>book<\/span><\/a> about that amazing journey and gives guest lectures at the Wageningen University and other institutions about starting a business as a student. Find out more about his journey and the lessons for founders he shared with us.
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1. Hi Thijs<\/a>, thank you for agreeing to do the interview. Could you tell us a bit about your background and how you entered the startup world?<\/b><\/p>\n

I started studying Business and Consumption studies at Wageningen University when I was 19 years old. I first studied law for two weeks, but I found it completely boring. After that, I took a gap year and I became a ski teacher in Austria. When I was there, I saw a lot of Dutch entrepreneurs running hotels and renting out spaces to people. And I really liked their entrepreneurial spirit. My dad is also an entrepreneur, he has a small cleaning company. My uncles were entrepreneurs, my grandfather had a bakery. I knew this was the right path for me so I chose to study Business and Consumption. It\u2019s basically economics mixed with consumer psychology; finding out why people make decisions. That\u2019s where I met my co-founder who told me how his sisters can\u2019t get rid of all the clothes they have but they\u2019re not using anymore. We thought: Why can\u2019t they just sell it on the internet in a safe way? So we decided to build United Wardrobe!<\/span><\/p>\n

2. United Wardrobe is a social marketplace designed for buying and selling fashion items. On October 27th, 2020, it was officially sold to Vinted<\/a>. Congratulations! Could you tell us more about this incredible journey?<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s so exciting that I\u2019m actually writing a <\/span>book<\/span><\/a> about that at the moment. We launched United Wardrobe in January 2014. When we launched the website, we immediately got some traction. We started getting traffic through the website, via Facebook and through marketplaces. We built two apps, launched them and they were a success in the Netherlands. Every euro was spent efficiently, without paying ourselves as founders anything. We did all of that next to our studies.<\/span><\/p>\n

By mid-2014, a lot of investors contacted us. We found two business angels who invested \u20ac250,000 because we already had a proven business case and were making money. With that investment, we could hire our first developers, build a customer support centre and hire a marketing team. We rolled out pretty quickly on YouTube with a lot of influencers using our platform. Then we got a million euros from Peak Capital and one of the old CMOs of booking.com. With that money, we started scaling in Belgium and France. Since our growth was super successful, we got another \u20ac1.5 million from the same investors. We built out the whole team in Utrecht with 40 professionals (from data analytics to finance).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Long story short, we had offers from some companies that wanted to buy us. On October 27th 2020 <\/span>Vinted<\/span><\/a> bought our company. It\u2019s strange to be bought by such a successful company after working on your own project for so many years, but it\u2019s one of the biggest events in my life.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. What is it about entrepreneurship that particularly attracts you? How do you feel you\u2019re contributing to the startup ecosystem in the Netherlands?<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the adventure that attracts me. When you\u2019re an entrepreneur, you\u2019re creating something from scratch. You\u2019re surrounded by amazing people with all kinds of skill sets whether they\u2019re part of your team, investors or other founders. Building a company is like having a dream that you really believe in and working towards the realization of that dream. It\u2019s amazing to see the dream getting more concrete day by day. We worked our way up to a platform with 4,5 million users. That\u2019s pretty amazing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m mostly contributing to the startup ecosystem in the Netherlands as a speaker who is sharing our story with other potential startup founders. If you\u2019re interested in booking me as a speaker, you can do it <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>!<\/span><\/p>\n

4. You give guest lectures at Wageningen University and other institutions about starting a business as a student. Could you share the top three lessons for founders you\u2019ve learned through your own experience?<\/b><\/p>\n