Two Kids,
One Phone Line
Barnett Ellman started in 2007 as a dorm-room experiment in doing talent representation differently. It never stopped being one.
The Origin
In 2007, two college entrepreneurs — Barnett and Ellman — launched a model agency with no office, no investors and no permission from the industry. What they had was a sharply designed Flash website, a board they called b|e models, an editorial side project named Scene Fashion, and the nerve to cold-call brands as if they had been booking talent for twenty years. It worked. Within two years the agency was placing faces in national campaigns, and the founders were named among America's Best Young Entrepreneurs by BusinessWeek — a nod less to their age than to the idea that an agency could be leaner, faster and more honest than the incumbents.
The early press cycle came and went, but the operating principles it celebrated never did: keep the board small, tell talent the truth, answer clients the same day, and never charge a new face a dollar to be developed.
The Build
Through the 2010s the agency grew deliberately. The Women and Men boards took their modern shape; the New Faces division formalized what had been instinctive street scouting into a structured, fee-free development program; and the Brand Casting desk emerged when clients began asking B|E to run entire castings rather than just submit options. A network of partner agencies — vetted one relationship at a time — now extends placements across 28 markets, from Paris and Milan to Tokyo and São Paulo.
The Standard
Today Barnett Ellman represents over 340 faces and has cast more than 1,900 campaigns, but it still runs like the two-person operation it once was. Every model has an agent who knows their career cold. Every client brief is answered by a person, not a portal. And every applicant — all of them — gets looked at by human eyes. That is the whole philosophy: fashion moves fast, and trust is the only thing that compounds.
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2007
The Launch
b|e models opens as a Flash-era website and a phone line, booking its first faces out of a college dorm in New York.
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2008
Scene Fashion
The agency's editorial project earns national press and puts B|E-scouted faces in front of major brand clients for the first time.
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2009
America's Best Young Entrepreneurs
BusinessWeek names the founders among America's Best Young Entrepreneurs, cementing the agency's reputation for reinvention.
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2013
The SoHo Office
B|E moves to Grand Street and formalizes its Women and Men divisions with dedicated senior agents.
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2017
New Faces, Formalized
Street scouting becomes a structured, fee-free development program — coaching, testing and managed debuts.
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2021
The Casting Desk
Brand Casting launches as a standalone service, running end-to-end castings for brands and production companies.
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2026
Today
340+ faces, 28 markets, 1,900+ campaigns cast — still capped rosters, still no fees for new talent, still one phone line that answers.