[2] In 1850, he formed a general partnership in a merchandising firm in Lafayette, Indiana, with his brother-in-law Solomon Loeb,[3] and by 1860, they were manufacturers of men's clothing and had a successful dry-goods merchant business in Cincinnati, Ohio.
[1] In 1865, Kuhn, Loeb, and another man, Samuel Wolff, turned away from the clothing industry to focus their business activities on banking, and in 1867 they established Kuhn, Loeb and Company in New York to take advantage of the economic expansion of the 1860s.
[4] However, following the death of his wife, in 1869 Kuhn withdrew from active participation in the business and returned to Germany with his young daughters Ida (born 1854) and Emily, settling at number 14 Feuerbachstrasse, Frankfurt, in his native Hesse, a house with a large garden.
Schiff married Therese Loeb, the daughter of Solomon Loeb and of Kuhn's sister Fannie, and went on to grow the firm into the second most prestigious investment bank in the United States, outdone only by Morgan's J. P. Morgan & Co.[1] Kuhn died in 1892 at Frankfurt.
[1] In 1903, she received an inheritance from Kuhn of 150,000 Marks and spent most of it on buying a villa in Cairo.