‘I’ve snapped up £200m sales,’ says MPB boss Matt Barker

Every day, some 1,000 parcels are wheeled into a small warehouse on a trolley at the back door of an aging unit on an industrial estate in East Sussex. Most will contain an old camera or photographic lens. The stranger may include an unwanted tripod or a discarded camera bag.

The stack of packages may look like old cameras dying, but it’s actually the cornerstone of one of the most interesting companies many people have never heard of. It is now traded internationally and is expected to sell in excess of £200 million this year.

MPB, with 450 employees in the UK, is based jointly in Brighton and in the equally hip locations of Brooklyn and Berlin. Founder and chief executive Matt Barker has taken the concept of the second-hand camera shops that used to be a feature of British high street shopping and brought the company online.

“The power of the internet is amazing,” he says. “It has opened up a niche for smaller industries to become major global industries.”

Despite the vast majority of people now reaching for their mobile phones to record their memories, old-fashioned cameras are still in high demand, with a value of £20 billion produced and sold each year.

Barker, 39, is a passionate advocate of ‘circularity’ – the economic and environmental benefits of reusing second-hand goods, eliminating waste and maximizing the use of all resources.

Cameras, he says, are ideal for second-hand trading because they’re built to last. ‘Manufacturers build obsolescence into many products, such as mobile phones, but not at all into cameras. ‘I find it very satisfying. Stuff comes in and goes out every day. Every day we find people who want to use them. It’s about making more of what we have, being less dependent on producing new, and getting people to think more about their own impact.’

Its platform matches buyers and sellers and also pays out cash or offers trade-ins when it accepts goods in-house.

Sellers get an estimate of their item’s value online before they ship it. It will be tested and authenticated upon arrival, and the estimated value will be adjusted if the camera or lens is not as described. It is then photographed and posted on the website with details and a six month warranty. Most people who send their camera equipment to MPB receive cash. The rest exchange their items for goods advertised on the MPB website.

That means there’s a lot of value in the stock warehouse – worth around £6 million in Brighton alone, which is just a third of sales. “We have 50,000 items in our warehouses worldwide at any given time,” says Barker.

The trick is to sell it quickly. Staff working in another office, near the Brighton seafront, are constantly raising and lowering prices to maximize revenue and move stock.

Each item takes an average of 22 days to sell, and while prices range from under £10 for a well-worn camera bag to £50,000 for a Hollywood-level movie camera, the average purchase is around £700.

Barker insists MPB never sends anything to the dump. “Nothing ever sells,” he says. ‘Everything has a price.

“The idea of ​​throwing anything away is an absolute nightmare. It would destroy what we stand for. We built technology that ensures that everything finds a new home. We’ve never thrown a tool away.’

This philosophy applies to the entire company — and it’s essential now, he says, to run a successful business with the best staff. “We send zero to landfill and we don’t use any plastic. In business you have to have an impact. People won’t work for you if you aren’t. People will not choose to buy from you. Little things really make a big difference.’

MPB’s customer base has changed in the 12 years since the company started. They used to be traditional photographers, says Barker. “But now that we have Instagram, the customer base has changed a lot.”

For starters, they’re no longer called photographers – they’re “visual storytellers” and “content creators” because so much of their output goes online.

Potential sellers are everywhere. More than half of British adults own a camera, many untouched since the advent of the smartphone. But almost three-quarters have never traded in an old gadget.

Like so many other Internet-based companies – including Google, Snapchat and Facebook – MPB started life in a college room, as a “side job” for Barker when he was an economics student at Warwick University.

A college student, amateur photographer, and a self-confessed nerd, he traded second-hand cameras on eBay to bring in extra cash. “I bought on one eBay account, sold on another, and made some money,” he says.

It became something bigger when his studies ended in 2005. “I was offered a place in the Bank of England’s graduate program in economics,” he recalls. ‘But I didn’t want to be in London. I wanted to be back in Brighton. So I kept acting down here and that enabled me to start living.’

In 2011, he shifted gears, hired some help and founded MPB as a dedicated platform for trading used cameras.

Barclays bank had witnessed his success on eBay and backed him with £1 million. The first five years were a pretty slow burn. He says: ‘By 2016 we were only 20 people and still just the UK, but we were starting to get known.’

Then came a change of sea. Barker and his lieutenants decided they had ‘a lot of ambition’ and borrowed £2 million in venture capital to expand and go international. They opened in New York in November 2016.

“We were really successful,” he says. ‘We have built as large a company in the United States in one year as we have in the UK in five years.’

So they went out and borrowed more. ‘We went from 20 employees to 450. We have increased sales by more than 20 times. This year we are heading towards £200 million. We are growing at 30 to 40 percent per year and we intend to continue to do so.’

With that in mind, he has raised three more tranches of funding totaling £64m with £14m from German sources linked to the opening of the Berlin hub.

It was not a location Barker expected or wanted to open and he remains exasperated by its necessity. They went to Germany, he says, because of Brexit.

MPB simply could no longer serve EU customers from the UK, he says. “There is a lot of friction at the border, so unfortunately cross-border trade from the UK to the EU is a challenge.”

The financing has diluted Barker’s shareholding. He’s coy about how much of the company he owns now, saying only that it’s “a decent amount.” It’s less than 50 percent, but none of his investors have a majority either, and he says he’s “still very motivated.”

The world is changing fast. He says making money quickly and easily “no longer fits the world we live in.” He adds, “I think people are aware of that now.”

Barker says, “Secondhand is booming right now.” MPB is ready for the arrival of many more cameras per day. He proudly adds: ‘We’ve now built a global infrastructure that can support around £1 billion in revenue.’