Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
He was seven years old, alone in a back room of his grandfather’s police equipment shop in Manhattan, when he pulled a Colt .32 revolver out of an old holster and pulled the trigger. The shot went into the wall of the store’s safe. Anthony Imperato ran, in his own words, “in total shock,” to find his father.
Forty-five years later, and one of the biggest names in American lever-action rifles, he still calls it his first lesson in gun safety — and it’s fitting, because almost everything Imperato built since started at that same counter, watching how his father and grandfather treated the people who walked through the door.
Table of contents
Early Lessons
Imperato didn’t grow up deciding to become a gun-industry executive. He grew up inside a gun store. His grandfather and father ran a police equipment shop in downtown Manhattan, and by the time he was a teenager, he was working the counter himself, selling duty and off-duty revolvers to NYPD officers still carrying wheelguns, alongside a walk-in civilian clientele that ranged from United Nations staff to hunters headed overseas.
One customer stuck with him more than any other. A father and son had just opened a check-cashing business in a tough part of Queens and came in new to firearms, asking for guidance. Imperato steered them toward a revolver instead of the semi-automatics that were already common at the time. A week later, they were back, thanking him; the gun had stopped a robbery.
“That really resonated with me,” Imperato said.
It’s the kind of formative moment that shows up again and again when Imperato talks about his life in guns: not a product, not a sale, but a relationship with a customer that mattered. It’s also, as it turns out, the actual thesis of the Henry Repeating Arms story and everything else in this interview, from how he founded the company to how he still measures success, comes back to that one idea.
What The Retail Counter Taught Him
Imperato traces almost everything about how Henry treats customers back to those years behind the counter with his father and grandfather.
“I knew that we needed to be honest with people, treat people right,” Imperato said. “If they were gonna spend their hard-earned money on something that we were selling, we wanted to make sure that they were satisfied.”
When he later started building his own product instead of just selling other people’s, he says the stakes went up.
“It’s something that we made, and people are gonna buy, and those people better be happy, or they get their money back,” Imperato said. “I took it very personally, and today our management team, they drank the same Kool-Aid. They take it very personally.”
That instinct became a literal, standing promise. Every Henry rifle and shotgun ships with a lifetime warranty, backed in the company’s own marketing language by Imperato’s personal guarantee. That’s a policy that traces in a straight line back to a teenager standing behind a Manhattan retail counter, learning that a customer’s trust is the only thing actually worth protecting in this business. It’s also the same instinct that, decades later, still shapes which stories Imperato reaches for first when asked about his career: not a product launch, but individual people.
One of those, on the extreme end, was a phone call from a former president. “I had former President Bush, the father, the first George Bush, call our office,” Imperato said. He’d been told to get off another call immediately because “you got a very important phone call.” It was Bush, telling him how proud he was of Henry Repeating Arms and the work the company was doing.
Another has recurred for Imperato at NRA banquets over the years, where Henry has made a practice of honoring veterans, law enforcement, and private citizens who’ve saved lives — an extension, in effect, of the same one-relationship-at-a-time philosophy the company applies to its charitable arm, Guns For Great Causes. In the interview, Imperato described one evening backstage with a World War II veteran in his late nineties who’d arrived in a wheelchair but insisted on walking onto the stage under his own power, holding Imperato’s elbow for balance while wearing the uniform he’d served in decades earlier.
“He said, I don’t want to go out on stage in the wheelchair; I want to walk,” Imperato recalled. “I told his heroic story, how he ran through a blizzard of gunfire, stumbled through a blown-up church, and there was a cross on the ground. He picked it up and carried it with him. When he knew he was going to be okay, he put the cross on that day and never took it off. He wore it every day of his whole life.”
According to HenryUSA’s own account of that ceremony, the veteran, George Krakosky, was drafted in the wake of Pearl Harbor and selected by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Army’s top marksmen, then swam ashore off a landing craft under German fire during the invasion of France, later fighting his way toward the town of St. Lo, where he found the cross in a bombed-out church.
“Being with an American hero like that,” Imperato said, “I’m incredibly grateful and honored that I’ve been able to do things like that.”
Respect As The Bottom Line
When asked about his biggest achievement, Imperato didn’t reach for a sales figure or a product launch.
“The biggest achievement, Kimber, is earning respect,” he said. “It’s not from an egotistical point of view. Whether it’s a consumer, a dealer, a distributor, a vendor, an industry partner, anyone that we’ve engaged with, I know that we could walk with our head up high and be very proud of what we’ve done, that we treated people, and most importantly our employees, better than they would expect.”
It’s a theme he returns to unprompted throughout the conversation, and it shapes how he talks about the hardest part of the job, too. He didn’t point to a single crisis or setback when asked about difficult moments. Instead, he pointed to the daily grind of the business itself: developing a product that’s genuinely difficult to manufacture, with a long gestation period from concept to what he calls “guns in a box and out the door,” while simultaneously running sales and distribution from the ground up.
“A consumer buys a gun and they have a very different attitude about gun purchases as opposed to, let’s say, buying a car,” Imperato said. A car can break down in a few weeks, and that’s just accepted as part of ownership. A gun, in the price range of $300 to $1,200 for an average model, “is gonna last 100 years. There’s no planned obsolescence here. We make something that’s gotta last more than a lifetime.” That’s a promise to a customer as much as it’s a manufacturing standard.
Betting On A Dying Category
The founding story of Henry Repeating Arms is, by Imperato’s own account, more instinct than strategy. In 1994, he took out a home equity loan to launch the Colt Blackpowder Arms Company in Brooklyn, making historic Colt reproductions under license. Two years later, he and his father, Louis, founded Henry Repeating Arms, securing the trademark to the Henry name and shipping their first rifles, the H001 Classic Lever Action .22, in March 1997. In the interview, Imperato described the moment plainly: sink or swim, with three young kids to support and no real inspiration beyond making it work.
He started the company at a moment when the category he chose was, by most measures, dying. “The lever-action was actually in very serious decline,” Imperato said. “By the early 1990s, Winchester was not doing well, and then they eventually went bankrupt… Marlin was aging out. Probably people would say you’re crazy for starting a gun company with a model that is on the wane.”
He leaned into it anyway, priced the H001 for accessibility, and built the company around a “Made in America” identity years before that became a standard industry marketing line. Henry’s name comes from Benjamin Tyler Henry, whose 1860 patent for a lever-action repeating rifle is generally credited as the first commercially successful repeating rifle design in American history, though Henry Repeating Arms has no corporate lineage to Henry or the original New Haven Arms Company; the modern company was founded to honor that history, not extend it.
Imperato calls the lever action America’s only truly homegrown firearm design, and today the catalog has broadened well past it with a revamped rimfire line, tactical and modern cowboy centerfire models, the SPT and Hush series, a semi-automatic 9mm with interchangeable magazines, single-barrel rifles and shotguns, and revolvers.
“I resurrected the lever-action market,” he said. “I can confidently, but humbly, say that.”
The Sand, Not The Home Run
Asked what he’d tell someone hoping to follow in his footsteps, Imperato didn’t offer a growth hack.
“If you’re thinking about going into business to get rich, forget about that,” he said. “You need to be the best you can be in all regards. If you’re the best you can be in all regards, the money will eventually come. If you think that this is a get-rich-quick scheme, go do something else, because it’s not.”
Then came the phrase that seems to sum up how he sees the last three decades of building Henry, and it’s not a coincidence that the whole metaphor is built out of individual relationships, the same currency he was trading in behind the counter in Manhattan.
“Henry was built, I call it, by the pinch of sand, a grain of sand at a time, on a daily basis,” Imperato said. “Email by email, consumer phone call by phone call, handshake by handshake. It’s hitting singles in a baseball game, not hitting the big home run. You just need to keep hitting singles on a daily basis, and you’ll eventually win the game.”
That philosophy shows up just as much in how he listens as in how he sells. Asked about interpersonal skills, Imperato didn’t describe a lightning-bolt moment of growth. He described a habit built slowly, one that maps directly onto that grain-of-sand approach: pay attention to the person in front of you before you decide what they need.
“I’m a big listener,” Imperato said. “I don’t go into a meeting where I want to be the only person talking. In fact, it’s the opposite. I want to hear everybody and give them the floor.” He credits a handful of older mentors for reinforcing that habit, along with a rule against snap judgments of people. “You need to really understand who a person is and where they came from, and why, before you can make any kind of assessment,” he said.
That approach appears to have paid off in an unusual currency, too. Imperato says decades of face-to-face relationships with Henry’s dealer and consumer base have turned strangers into something closer to family.
Where The Relationships Show Up In Person
That same instinct- one relationship, not one transaction- is easiest to see in how Imperato actually spends his time off the clock. His favorite place to shoot isn’t a marquee industry venue. It’s a longtime Staten Island club he describes as “no-frills,” with scrambled-egg sandwiches and coffee on Saturday mornings and, in his words, “chewing the fat with the guys.” The same club has hosted shooting events for children from the Ronald McDonald House in New York, many of them, he said, firing a gun for the first time in their lives.
On a larger scale, Henry organized what Imperato calls the Thousand Man Shoot in November 2016 at the Ben Avery Shooting Range in Arizona. It’s a thousand people firing Henry rifles simultaneously. He said he was “extremely relieved” when it went off without a hitch, and a companion event, a Thousand Woman Shoot, is on his personal bucket list. Both follow the same logic as everything else Imperato talks about: not a marketing stunt for its own sake, but a chance to put a large number of individual people behind a Henry rifle at the same time, in person, all at once.
His own favorite gun to shoot isn’t one of the hundreds of models Henry has produced, either. It’s still his grandfather’s .32 revolver, the same one that, decades earlier, ended up putting a bullet through a safe wall in a Manhattan storage room.
“That means a lot to me,” Imperato said.
His outside business inspiration comes from a different world entirely, but with the same underlying value. He named Roger Penske as a business hero, drawn to a slow-and-steady building philosophy, calculated risk, a reputation for treating people well, and staying humble along the way. It’s the same short list of values Imperato applies to Henry, just borrowed from a different industry: build the relationship first, and let the growth follow from that instead of chasing it directly.
Rapid Fire: Anthony Imperato Fun Facts
I closed with a few quick ones so readers can find some common ground with the man behind the rifles.
Q: Favorite gun to shoot? A: His grandfather’s .32 revolver, hands down. A close second is the feeling of shooting the first unit off the line for a new model, after the three to four years it typically takes Henry to bring a design from concept to production.
Q: Favorite places to shoot? A: A no-frills, decades-old club on Staten Island for a regular Saturday morning, and the Ben Avery Shooting Range in Arizona, site of Henry’s 2016 Thousand Man Shoot.
Q: Leader he looks up to? A: Roger Penske. “He built a hugely successful business in a very similar fashion — slow and steady, took risks, took gambles, treated people right, is extremely humble.”
Q: What’s he reading? A: John Malone’s “Born to Be Wild but Wired.” He recently finished Charles and Chase Koch’s “Becoming a Principle-Driven Leader.”
Q: Firearm bucket-list item? A: A Thousand Women Shoot, modeled on the 2016 event at Ben Avery.
Q: Coolest piece of industry memorabilia he owns? A: Early 1960s firearms advertisements that belonged to his father, and brochures from his grandfather’s police equipment shop dating back to the early 1900s.
Q: What would surprise people in the industry about him? A: He’s been a serious home cook since boyhood, learning in his grandmother’s kitchen. His style leans Italian and broadly Mediterranean: Portuguese, Spanish, French, Greek, and the schnitzel-versus-Milanese debate.
Q: Strongest values that got him here? A: “Honesty comes to mind first. Treating people better than they would expect. Those are the two things that come to my mind immediately.”
Key Facts About Anthony Imperato And Henry Repeating Arms
| Current role | Founder and CEO, Henry Repeating Arms |
|---|---|
| Years in the firearms industry | 45-plus, starting in the family gun shop in 1978 |
| Henry founded | 1996, with father Louis Imperato |
| First rifles shipped | March 1997, the H001 Classic Lever Action .22 |
| Signature category | Lever-action rifles |
| Charitable arm | Guns For Great Causes |
Is a college student studying News & Journalism with almost four years of experience working in the field. As a writer and copy editor for GunsAmerica, she enjoys covering topics that matter to gun owners and supporters of the Second Amendment.
Outside of class and work, Kimber serves as president of her local Turning Point USA chapter, where she helps lead campus outreach and engage with voices in the world of political activism. She also spends her free time reading history, studying the Constitution, and practicing at the range—especially with a pistol. When not writing or organizing, Kimber enjoys learning about homesteading, DIY projects, and hands-on skills that promote self-reliance.
Experience:
– Journalism Student – Currently studying News & Journalism in college with real-world writing and editing experience.
– Writer & Copy Editor – Works with GunsAmerica to create clean, accurate, and engaging content.
– TPUSA Chapter President – Leads a campus chapter and collaborates with key figures in conservative activism.
– History, Constitution, and America Fan – Loves learning how the past shapes today’s freedoms.
– Shooter – Practical experience and solid skills at the range.