Photo by Erin Nelson.
Anne Marie Ellis, Mary Wyatt Crenshaw and Amy Herrington stand in the lobby of the new Altadena Eye Care clinic, owned by Herrington, on Dec. 7.
After more than 30 years of practicing optometry in the greater Birmingham area, it was time for Dr. Amy Herrington to make a change.
This month, she’ll celebrate the grand opening of her new optometry practice, Altadena Eye Care, located at 2409 Acton Road, Suite 161.
Herrington is originally from Charleston, South Carolina, and graduated from the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Optometry. Her career started at Schaeffer Eye Center, which is now owned by MyEyeDr, and remained at the practice for the past three decades.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and like many other people, the pandemic interrupted Herrington’s career. For one month after the initial economic shutdown in March, Herrington stayed at home, only venturing to the optometry office for small tasks or to see emergency patients.
When the optometry office began to reopen its doors to patients, Herrington remained at home — not every optometrist was immediately called back to the office.
The time spent at home gave Herrington an opportunity to imagine what it would be like if she had her own optometry practice. Then she thought, “What if I really did this?”
“I liked the idea that — I’m not in the beginning of my career, obviously — but I can chart my own course through the end of my career,” she said. “I got positive feedback, and I’m excited about making my own decisions and choosing how I want to see my own patients in a way I wasn’t able to do.”
One thing Herrington finds gratifying about optometry is being the first one to intervene when people have illnesses and aren’t aware.
“Particularly, I’ve had over the years two young men who had leukemia and had not been diagnosed, but because of what I saw from looking into their eyes, they were able to get treatment early,” she said. “That’s making a difference for someone, and I don’t know if people always realize that an optometrist can tell a lot about your health from our exams.”
She also enjoys keeping people’s vision from getting worse, she said. Over the years, she saw many young people show up when they’re ages 6-9, and every year, they came back needing a much stronger prescription. Not only is it annoying for the person to need a stronger prescription, but Herrington said it’s not good for the eye, either — it weakens the eye over time.
“So one of the new things now is putting these young people in contact lenses that keep their prescription from changing as rapidly,” she said. “I find it very exciting.”
To help her create a new space where her business can thrive, Herrington enlisted the help of two other women business owners: Anne Marie Ellis, who is a principal at Line Scale Form, is the project architect and helped design the plans for the optometrist practice. Mary Wyatt Crenshaw, who is CEO at Wyatt Builds, took Ellis’ vision and built it. Ellis noted there aren’t many women in architecture — especially not in the South.
“I feel like we’re coming alongside each other and letting our individual talents shine,” Ellis said.
What’s meaningful about the project to Wyatt is supporting small businesses — and on top of that, supporting women-owned small businesses.
“I’ve seen how hard Amy has worked to get this project just right, for the vision in her head to match up with the design plans and the construction,” Wyatt said. “That’s what’s been so exciting, to play a meaningful role in her first small businesses as she opens that. It’s exciting for me as a fellow entrepreneur to be a part of that.”
