Remarkable people, places, and pursuits.
One hundred and forty pages, and nothing in them for sale. That is what makes it worth keeping and handing on.
Stories you find yourself retelling.
Remarkable people, the places worth crossing the country for, and things made by someone who refused to compromise. Long-form, by professional writers and photographers, under editorial direction that answers to the reader and to nobody else.
Roughly three quarters of every issue is delight. The rest is a quiet question, never preached.
The bar for a story is not that it is interesting. It is that your client can say to someone, "there was a piece in this about a man who..." and mean it. A story that cannot be retold cannot carry your name anywhere.
The eleven departments.
The same departments return every quarter. The stories inside them are new each time.
A single photograph, and the story of it.
A destination worth the journey.
A journey told by the people who made it.
The business behind the game.
Stories worth a drink.
One thing the publisher could not keep to himself.
Five long-form features, built around the single word that names the issue.
The good you may not have known about.
The moment that turns a life.
Objects, gear, and small obsessions.
The one the issue leaves you with.
Heavy stock. Bound flat. Nothing in it that anyone paid to put there.
Paper chosen so the publication has weight in the hand and lies open on a table without being held down. Full-bleed photography. Generous margins. Quiet page numbers.
No advertisements, no inserts, nothing falling out of the spine. People who pick one up tend to reach for the same word. Weight.
Experience it:
The front cover sells nothing.
A remarkable photograph and the wordmark. Simple, elegant, timeless.
This is a decision with a job. A cover that sells is a cover that gets thrown away. A cover that names the sender is a cover that gets left face down. Everything LENS does depends on the copy staying out where people can see it, and on it looking like it belongs there.
Your name is inside, where it is found rather than shown.
The gates are panels that tuck into the front and back covers, roughly three inches by eleven, set off from the cover photograph by a single gold rule.
Open the front and there is your photograph, your name, and your message in your own words, signed by you. Open the back and there is your firm, your city, a few lines about you, and how to reach you. They come in parchment or charcoal, so they sit with your own brand rather than against it.
Our designers build the gates with you, message included. You approve once, and you can change the message any quarter you like.
This is the whole of your part, and it is the whole of the mechanism. Your client does not learn your name from the cover. She learns it the way she learned the name of her tailor, by opening something good and finding it there, four times a year.
Watch Brandon open one. Ninety seconds. Nothing plays until you press it.
Each issue is built around a single word.
IMPACT. PURSUIT. SANCTUARY. ENDURE.
The word shapes the features, and each issue leaves the reader with one question. Impact asks what you are actually doing with what you have been given. Pursuit, what you are still chasing, and why. Sanctuary, where you go to become yourself again. Endure, what you are building that will still matter when you are gone.
These are the questions a great advisor gets asked and a mediocre one never raises. Your name is on the thing that asked them.
The first issue is delivered in the LENS box.
A black shipping box arrives at the door. Inside it is the presentation box: black, rigid, the wordmark in gold foil on the lid. Under the lid sits your announcement, with your photograph, your name, and a line saying that an issue will arrive four times a year, with your compliments. Beneath the announcement is the publication.
Every issue after that is delivered on its own, in December, March, June, and September. Your recipient does nothing. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to renew, and nothing asked of them at any point.
Photographs of it are not the same as holding it.
We will send you an issue.