Michelle Pencharz still remembers how it all began. Back in 1992, she and her business partner Sean Cohen opened their first practice together in Morleyside, and 31 years on, they are still very much a team. Since 2019 they have called Dunkeld West home, tucked into what Michelle describes as this very cute, quirky, old shopping centre that she hopes they never fix up. There is something special about a business built on that kind of history, and it shows in the way she talks about her work. “We’re very privileged that we have our own business,” she says. “We have the fashion, we have the science, we have the medicine. It’s a very integrated profession for us and it’s worked very well.”

That sense of purpose runs even deeper through a project close to Michelle’s heart called Vision Drive. Alongside the day to day running of the practice, she and her team work with scholar taxi drivers, the people who ferry children to and from school every single day. A dedicated test room in Wynberg is used to check these drivers’ eyesight, and once they are tested, they walk away with a brand new pair of glasses, completely free of charge. As Michelle puts it, “if you buy a pair of glasses here, part of that goes towards funding a taxi driver’s eyes.” It is a lovely full circle moment, one where customers are quite literally helping someone see clearly just by treating themselves to a new pair of frames.

It is this kind of thinking that has shaped how Michelle sees eyewear altogether. Over the years, she has watched glasses transform from a purely practical purchase into a genuine fashion statement. “It’s become much easier to own a beautiful, design, stylish pair of eyewear,” she explains, “and you can get into the fashion of it rather than trying to get into the shoes, bags and clothing.” For Michelle, glasses sit right there on your face, so they are often the very first thing people notice about you. “It’s on your face, it’s your personality, it represents you,” she says, and it is this idea that has made eyewear such an exciting part of her work.

Some of that excitement comes from her yearly trips to Paris, where she and Sean attend SILMO, one of the biggest optical fairs in the world. It was there, in 2023, that they crossed paths with a designer named Jeremy Miklitarian of eyewear brand Tarian, whose frames caught their attention immediately. “They have a wonderful quirkiness but they also are timeless,” Michelle says. “He doesn’t design according to what the trends are at the time.” She describes his aesthetic as having a distinctly South African feel to it: “a bit of grittiness, a bit of edginess and a lot of colour but easy to wear. Very comfortable, very contemporary.” Finding the balance between frames like these, local fashion tastes, and what is happening across Europe keeps things interesting, something Michelle calls “a very interesting challenge.”

Still, underneath all the style and the travel and the fairs in Paris, Michelle never loses sight of what optometry is really about. “Our first task is to give you comfortable, clear vision,” she says, “and that’s where we started, that’s what we studied, that’s what optometry is.” Pairing that clear vision with a set of frames someone genuinely loves wearing is, in her words, what she and her team “aim to do.”

Michelle brings a bit of that same playfulness into her own personal style too. She often reaches for square frames or cat eye styles, which she feels “cuts off the real sharpness” of her face, and colour is a big part of her look as well. Rather than matching her glasses to her outfit, she prefers to mix things up entirely. “It doesn’t go with what you wear, which I like,” she says. “It actually doesn’t matter what you have on your face and what you wear on your body, they enhance one another.”

Behind the scenes, the practice is run by five women, all mothers juggling busy lives outside of work. “None of us work a full day, none of us work every day, we are all mothers,” Michelle explains. “We’re very lucky in that we have a lifestyle, we have hobbies, we have families and we work.” That flexibility, she believes, is exactly why the practice works so well, since it “enables us to come in here and love what we’re doing here.”

A bit about Jeremy and brand Tarian: Jérémy, who has lived with severe near-sightedness since childhood, received his first pair of glasses at age 11 – designed by his father, the renowned Alain Mikli, a French-Armenian designer of high-end handmade eyewear and accessories. Renowned for bold colours and sculptural forms, Alain Mikli’s creations have achieved global acclaim among artists, celebrities and design connoisseurs, both in Europe and in the US.

Jérémy, who had become a highly accomplished ceramicist as a young man, studied graphic design followed by two years in product design before establishing his own brand in Paris in 2011. He followed in his father’s footsteps and began his own adventures with original eyewear designs and different manufacturing techniques. The name, Tarian, reflects his pride in the legacy his father is creating – the syllable ‘ian’ means ‘son of’.