About
Built by two people who got tired of losing money on their own gear.
We are James Headrick and Wes Wages. Between us we have spent about thirty years behind cameras, in edit bays, and on sets where the gear budget was the whole budget.
Which means we have also spent thirty years buying and selling equipment. Upgrading bodies. Offloading a lens that never earned its keep. Selling a package after a job wrapped to make payroll.
Every time, the same two bad options.
The choice nobody likes
of retail, which is what your gear is worth to them rather than what it is worth. That gap is not a scam. It is their margin, and they earn it by taking on the risk and the warranty. But it comes out of your pocket, and if you have ever watched a $6,000 camera turn into a $2,800 offer, you know how that lands.
Better money. Worse night’s sleep. The buyer who claims the package never arrived. The seller who takes your payment and goes quiet. The “barely used” body with 900,000 clicks on it. The gear that turns out to be stolen off somebody’s cart two cities over, which you find out later, from someone who is not happy to see you.
We built Film Gear Hub to remove the second problem without giving away the money.
What we actually do about it
We are not going to tell you the platform is safe and leave it there. Here is the specific machinery.
Every seller proves who they are before they list anything. A government ID and a live selfie, captured by Stripe Identity, matched to the account we pay them into. Not a checkbox. Nobody lists here without it.
Before a listing goes live, and again at the sale, for anything that actually carries one — a body, a lens, a cinema camera, a recorder. Grip, bags and most accessories mostly never had a number stamped on them at all, and the listing says so rather than inventing one. Where there is a serial, that is what a claim is decided against: the body you unbox is provably the body you paid for, not a tidier one photographed for the listing. To be plain about what it is not — we do not run serials against a stolen-property database, ours or anyone else’s, and we will not describe recording a number as a theft check.
5 grades, defined in advance, the same for everybody. A seller grades against it and photographs every mark they declare. Overstating a grade is what a case gets opened about.
Your payment is charged at purchase, but the seller cannot touch the money. They can see that it is held, which is what gets the package sent. It releases to them when you accept, or 48 hours after delivery if you say nothing. At $6,000 and up we don’t accept a card for the purchase itself — you pay by bank transfer (ACH) or a pay-over-time option instead, on the same hold-and-release terms.
Every buyer passes the same ID check the seller did, at any amount, and we compare the name on their card against the name on that ID. This one is for the seller: you are shipping to a stranger, and a checked account makes the worst outcome far harder to arrange.
Not an upsell you forget to click. We issue it, so nobody can quietly skip the insurance, and it is tracked with a signature required on delivery.
A policy, not a case-by-case favour. You have 48 hours from delivery: open a case inside that and nothing releases; send it back and you get your money. Miss it and the payment has gone to the seller.
What it costs
8.5% when it sells. No listing fee, nothing at all if it never sells, and no deductions invented after the fact.
91.5% of the sale price. The figures above are computed by the same function that decides your payout, not typed onto this page. Shipping and tax are the buyer’s, and pass through to the carrier and the state without touching your side of it. What changes on the largest orders is set out here.
Who we are
James Headrick
Runs StoryChef Media in Austin, Texas, where he has spent 15 years producing brand films, commercials and founder stories for everyone from solo operators to Fortune 500 marketing teams. Before video he was a firefighter and a search and rescue volunteer, which is where he picked up the habit that shapes how he builds things: when the stakes are real, you do not improvise.
Wes Wages
Founder of Armosa Studios, a branded video company working out of Florence, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee, with client work for Winnebago, Williams-Sonoma, Shipt and Digital Currency Group. He also owns and runs Film Gear For Sale, a community of roughly 250,000 filmmakers, photographers and audio pros. Film Gear Hub grew directly out of watching that group work, and watching where it broke down.
We are not a private equity rollup and we are not a pawn shop with a nice logo. We are two working video people who wanted a place where our own gear would be worth what it is worth.
Fair price, real protection, no lottery ticket.
You should not have to choose between getting paid fairly and knowing the transaction will hold up. That was the whole reason to build this. If you have gear sitting in a case that has not moved in a year, list it. If you are looking for a body or a lens or a mixer and you would rather buy it from a working professional than a stranger with a stock photo, start there.
United States only for now: the 50 states and DC.