Our Story

It’s Not What You Think… It’s What You DO That Matters!

Envisage Change

Dr. Samuel Berger is the founder and visionary (quite literally, as you will see) behind Envisage Change.

A medical doctor working in a remote region of Canada, he provides medical care in an area where there just aren’t enough doctors to go around. That makes for a busy and varied experience working in the Emergency Room, doing hospital rounds, and running a family practice. His patients run from newborns right through to the very oldest members of the community. He works in the Canadian outback because he believes that everyone has the right to quality medical care, no matter where they live.

So why on earth did a highly qualified and idealistic doctor start a T-shirt company?

The story begins several decades ago when he was just 10 years old. When Dr. Berger was a kid, Science was cool, and he entered a project called “Negative Afterimages” into the Manitoba Schools’ Science Fair. The centerpiece of the project was a poster that said “Have You Ever Seen a Blue Moon?”

It read:

"A blue moon occurs when, at harvest time the moon is full and beautiful, farmers look at it for long periods of time. After admiring it they take their eyes off of it and look somewhere else. Their afterimage will be blue. This is known as a blue moon."

If truth be told, that was a bit of poetic license, but it served its purpose. Throngs of visitors stopped by Samuel’s exhibit and learned how to see a blue moon by creating an afterimage after staring at a yellow moon on a blue background.

Interestingly, Samuel could also conjure up the afterimage, even though he is colorblind.

That project won First Prize and the much-acclaimed Samuel was hooked on what was to become a lifetime interest in Science.

Fast forward forty years or so

Now known as Dr. Berger, Samuel was asked to do a “show-and tell” session for his daughter’s first grade class. He decided to show them how to see a blue moon.

Everyone loved it. It ignited the children’s imaginations and they, too, began to understand just how cool Science can be.

Dr. Berger wanted to continue to inspire the kids, just as he had been inspired when he was a kid by John Jaman, his Science teacher. He still remembered the excitement he felt as he first began to really understand how wonderful Science could be.

Dr. Berger decided to capture the “Wow Factor” of seeing afterimages in a book called “Have You Ever Seen a Blue Moon?” which combines Science, Art and Poetry in an unusual combination to show younger students the wonders of their world.

While working on the book, Dr. Berger had another idea. What if you could put a blue moon on a T-shirt? What if you could get afterimages to work for different color combinations and you could use those afterimages to excite and inform and effect change?

What if you could get people talking about the important things in Life, like taking care of our planet, and taking care of each other?

Always the doctor and idealist, and sometimes the entrepreneur, Dr. Berger realized that combining fun, fashion and scientific facts could be a great way not only to envisage change in ourselves, our communities and our planet, but also a way to help put those changes into action.

Let’s not just envisage change.

Let’s do something to make it happen.

Let’s change our world for the better.