All in a Name: The Vision Behind Envisage
Starting an independent architecture firm was no small feat. There’s a lot of work that goes into launching and growing a small business, but there’s a lot of excitement, too. When Sarah and I committed to leaving our corporate careers and venturing out to create our own firm, we had a lot of decisions to make, and one of the first was the name of our new business.
After working for more than two decades in the optical industry—plus the fact that I met Sarah while we both worked at Luxottica—it felt like ‘vision’ needed to be a cornerstone of our brand. We both learned so much and developed exceptional insight to the field working in the optical world for so long that moving forward without a testament to the past didn’t feel right. In addition, we decided that one of our markets of focus would continue to be the vision and optical industry. It was very clear that ‘vision’ was a part of our business vision.
For me, my passion is OneSight. My experience working in communities and regions across the globe taught me so much, and I’m still humbled to know and have met people in these communities who live their daily lives with my kind of eyesight and no form of vision correction. Without my glasses, I would not know how to function in so many facets of my life, but above all—working would be a nearly impossible task. I gained so much appreciation through those projects and that work, and I carry that perspective with me every day.
When it came to naming our business, my own personal framework was to envision what I want to become, and who I want to be, in an effort to achieve my goals. There’s a word for that practice: envisage.
The definition of envisage is “to contemplate or conceive of as a possibility or a desirable future event.” Or, in other words, to imagine, visualize, or envision the future. Another definition of the word has to do more with expectations: to envisage something is “to expect something in the future, especially something good” or to “visualize something you have not yet seen.”
Our vision, and our hope, was to build an inspiring architecture and design firm that could build amazing things for our clients—to help them bring a reality to life that they have never yet seen. Envisage, it seemed, was the calling: to create a business and a life for ourselves while also designing and creating amazing work for our clients. And even better? The connection to vision, the critical piece of our past that propelled us to the future, remained intact and relevant as we grow and expand our ability to serve independent optical providers and retailers. The business, as it turned out, named itself.
Today, Envisage is part of our everyday life. We turn vision into reality through our work, and with every new client and successful project, we’re living out the life and the service we envisaged together at the start of our journey. Kismet!
