It'Sugar — A Candy Store in New York
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEP 2023 — UPDATED MAY 2026
IT'Sugar — When a Candy Store Becomes a Photo Opportunity
There are places you walk into by accident and walk out of with a memory card full of images you didn't expect to take. IT'Sugar on Broadway, in the NoHo neighbourhood of Manhattan, was one of those places for me.
Colourful candy display at IT'SUGAR store, NoHo, New York – bCLPhoto
I spotted it from the street — you can't really miss it. The window display alone stops you in your tracks: towers of oversized gummy bears, walls of colour-coded sweets, packaging blown up to absurd proportions. I had no intention of going in. And then I did, camera in hand, and spent the next half hour completely absorbed.
Interior of IT'SUGAR candy store with vibrant colours, New York – bCLPhoto
A Photographer's Playground
I'm not particularly fond of sweets, if I'm honest. But that's almost beside the point inside IT'Sugar. The place is designed to overwhelm the senses — and for a photographer, that's an invitation, not a warning.
The light inside was my first challenge. Artificial, mixed, and coming from every direction — bright LEDs bouncing off reflective packaging, neon-coloured displays throwing coloured casts onto everything. I was shooting with my Sony a7R IV and leaned on a relatively fast shutter to freeze the occasional movement of customers browsing around me. I kept the ISO under control — around 800 — and let the colours do the heavy lifting. The last thing you want in a place like this is noise drowning out all that saturated chaos.
Composition was the real game. Every shelf is a riot of shapes and colours competing for attention, so the discipline is in choosing — isolating one element, finding a frame within the frame, letting a single oversized lollipop dominate against a blurred wall of pick-and-mix behind it. I shot a lot and kept little. That's usually how it goes when the subject matter is this dense.
A Bit of Context
IT'Sugar was founded in 2006 by Jeff Rubin with a simple enough premise: a candy store that doesn't take itself seriously. Today it has over 100 locations across the United States and Canada, and bills itself as one of the largest specialty candy retailers in the world. The NoHo store on 665 Broadway is one of their flagship locations — three floors of sweets, merchandise, and general sensory overload.
Their tagline is "more than just a candy store — it's an experience." As marketing lines go, it's hard to argue with. Whether or not you leave with a bag of sour worms, you leave with something.
IT'Sugar dispenser with amazing flavors, street photography in New York. – bCLPhoto
Getting There
IT'Sugar NoHo
665 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
Nearest subway: Broadway–Lafayette St (B, D, F, M) or Prince St (N, R, W)
New York rewards the curious eye. For more from the city, see Brooklyn Unfiltered: A Street Photography Walk — a longer walk through neighbourhoods far from Times Square — or 4th of July Fireworks in New York for the city at its most theatrical.
See more street photography in the portfolio.
Cosme Lapena is a Barcelona-based street and urban photographer and founder of bCLPhoto. Browse the portfolio or read more on the blog
