Who Owns B&H Photo?

Herman and Blimie Schreiber opened B&H in 1973 as a small storefront film shop at 17 Warren Street in Tribeca, near Manhattan's old Radio Row electronics district. The shop sold film, cameras, and darkroom supplies to working photographers, a customer base concentrated downtown at the time.

Later in the 1970s the store moved to 119 West 17th Street in the Photo District, the corridor between Fifth and Sixth Avenues where New York's professional photo trade clustered. The assortment widened into a full range of professional film and photography equipment, and the company built a mail-order business through catalog ads in photography magazines, which became a national sales channel before the internet existed.

During the 1990s, B&H added computers, lighting, and audio equipment as digital imaging began displacing film. In 1997 the store moved to its current location at 420 Ninth Avenue at 34th Street, a block-long retail space that grew into roughly 70,000 square feet of showrooms, departments, and the famous conveyor system that moves merchandise from stockrooms to checkout.

E-commerce transformed the business again in the 2000s. B&H invested early in online retail, added used equipment sales, rental operations, and the B&H Payboo store credit card. The company now lists more than 400,000 products across photo, video, pro audio, computers, drones, and home entertainment, serving professionals and consumers in 179 countries. Its workforce passed 2,000 employees, with more than 800 staff members having tenure beyond ten years.