I started CATCH because I wanted my life to feel different

A few years ago I actually added it up. Seven hours a day on my phone. Another seven on a laptop for work.

Fourteen hours. More than I was asleep. And nothing was wrong exactly, which was somehow worse. Weeks were going past perfectly fine and leaving nothing behind, and I could not have told you what I had done with any of them.

I wanted something that felt different. Not a productivity system, not a five-year plan. Something to do with my hands that was not more input.

Then my brother turned 30

We went to Ibiza for it. And on the way, almost as an afterthought, I picked up a disposable camera. No real reason. It felt like the kind of thing you take on a trip like that.

I took about 27 photos across four days. My phone stayed in my pocket far more than it normally would have, because there was nothing to check and nothing to post. I had no idea whether any of the shots had worked.

Then I got them back a couple of weeks later, and they were the best photos I had of any trip I had ever been on. Not the sharpest. The best. Everyone looked like themselves. I could remember taking every single one.

Then I threw the camera in a bin

Which is the bit that actually bothered me. The whole thing had worked, and the object that made it work was designed to be binned after 27 photos.

So I went looking for the reusable version, and it was not there. There were two options and neither of them was it.

More disposables. Buy another one, then another one, throw each one away. A lot of plastic for something you cannot get better at.

Or a 40-year-old camera off eBay. I went a long way down that road. Light meters, shutter curtains, forum threads about the specific ways an old camera dies on you halfway through a trip. Genuinely interesting. Completely wrong for handing to your brother at 1am in Ibiza.

What I wanted sat in between and nobody was making it. Reusable, so you keep it and get better with it. Simple enough that there is nothing to get wrong. Cheap enough that you would take it somewhere it might get knocked about.

So we built one

Every decision on this camera was made by asking whether it would survive a real weekend with real people who do not care about photography.

The harder half was getting the photos back

Making a camera is the easy part. The reason most people try film once and stop is what happens after the roll is finished.

You have to find a lab. You have to work out what scanning means and which option to pick. You pay again, weeks after you already paid for the film, and you do the maths on whether this particular roll was worth it. Most people do that once and the camera goes in a drawer.

So we took that whole part on. There is a prepaid mailer in every box. You finish a roll, drop it in, put it in any postbox, and the postage is covered in both directions. The developing is already paid for, so nothing lands on you afterwards.

Then a person on our team checks your roll in by hand. We develop in small batches so the chemistry stays fresh rather than being run to exhaustion, and every frame is scanned and colour-checked individually rather than pushed through in bulk. If something has gone wrong on a roll, we email you and say so.

About seven days after you post it, a private gallery lands in your inbox. High resolution, yours to download, share and print.

That is why the film keeps coming too. Fresh rolls turn up every three months with the developing already covered, so there is always one in the drawer before the trip rather than after it. The camera was never really the product. The habit is.

Three years and 10,000 customers later

We built this from nothing, out of London, with a very small team. Since then 10,000 people have shot rolls on a CATCH and sent them back to us, and the photos that come through are still the best part of the job by a distance.

The three years in between have been product testing, taking the camera out to see what breaks, building the business, partnerships and a fair bit of charity work. Weddings. Hen dos in Lisbon. Somebody's first trip to Japan. A nine-year-old's school trip where phones were not allowed. Rolls that sat in a bag for four months and came back better than anyone expected.

None of them are technically perfect. That stopped bothering me somewhere around Ibiza.

What I'd say to you

If you have the same feeling I had, that weeks are going past fine and leaving nothing behind, this is a small and genuinely enjoyable thing to do about it.

You will take fewer photos and like more of them. You will be more present on the trip, because there is nothing to check. And you will have something at the end of it rather than another folder you never open.

Start with one roll. Take it somewhere that matters, shoot 24 frames, post it back, and see what lands in your inbox a week later. That is the whole pitch.