[1] Founders and friends Ebner 'Eb' Glooskin and Leonard 'Len' Seaman, founded the EbLens saga by opening a small Workingman's store located in New Britain, Connecticut, which sold army surplus goods.

It was an instant success and attracted a lot of customers, and Glooskin and Seaman responded to this success by rapidly expanding their retail footprint into neighborhoods and rural areas in order to become closer to its customers than its major competitors at the time, which included Thom McAn, Montgomery Ward, JCPenney, Sears, and Florsheim Shoes.

EbLens entered the urban lifestyle in the 1990s as it saw the potential to increase sales even further by doing this, and in effort to compete with other clothing chains such as Old Navy, Gap, Aeropostale, PacSun, and Banana Republic, and opened its first store specifically focused on urban fashion in Brockton, Massachusetts in 2004, near Brockton High School.

EbLens was one of the nine wholesale accounts terminated, with the others being City Blue, VIM, Belk, Dillard's, Fred Meyer, Bob's Stores, Boscov's, and Zappos.

[6] On June 12, 2023, it was announced that all remaining EbLens would be liquidating in a way similar to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation, and all stores would permanently close by the end of July 2023 after being severely affected from the COVID-19 pandemic, their wholesale account termination from Nike, and tough competition from other shoe store chains.