UsedLens started during the COVID-19 lockdown of March 2020. My photography work — weddings, schools, sports events — was cancelled overnight, and I found myself with time on my hands and a habit I couldn't shake: checking used camera prices.
The frustration was this: every time I wanted to look at a lens, I'd visit MPB, then Wex, then Park Cameras, then eBay, then maybe a few others. By the time I'd finished, I'd lost track of what I'd seen and where. There was no single place that showed you everything at once.
So I built one. I started with Leica equipment — sourcing data from Red Dot Cameras and Leica Manchester — mostly because that's what I was personally interested in at the time. My wife suggested the design looked a bit rough, which was fair. She was right. It improved.
I expanded to other brands, then other retailers. Categorising everything turned out to be harder than it looked. I tried organising by lens mount but abandoned it quickly — retailer data is wildly inconsistent. Brand-based browsing with search and filters worked better in practice.
By the time I wrote this post, UsedLens had aggregated over 60 UK retailers. The response from users was better than I'd expected — people found it fast, clean, and genuinely useful for spotting deals. That was enough to keep going.