Steve Sutherlin to retire from The Vision Council

After five years with The Vision Council, Steve Sutherlin has announced his retirement as Lab Division Liaison. He held the position of President of the Optical Laboratories Association from 2005 to 2006, and was a member of the Association’s Board from 1998 to 2007. He was also the President of the Midwest Optical Laboratories Association for two years, was inducted into the Optical Laboratories Association Hall of Fame in 2008 and honored again by The Vision Council’s Lab Division with the prestigious Director’s Choice award in 2019. Sutherlin served as the Lab Division Liaison for The Vision Council from 2015 through 2020.

The graduate of the University of Missouri – Kansas City is an optical industry lifer, having started folding mailing boxes for the family lab (Sutherlin Optical) on Sundays at a very early age and remaining there for 41 years, 24 of them as president, until his retirement in 2015.

Sutherlin is married with 3 children, and 4 grandchildren. Outside of work he enjoys golf, water skiing with his new knees, and a great cabernet. Sutherlin now looks forward to having more leisure time to spend at the family’s lake house and with the grandchildren or traveling and pursuing his hobbies. But that doesn’t mean he’s done with working. He plans to do work more with the Kansas City Free Eye Clinic and would definitely consider consulting on interesting projects that he’d enjoy putting his fingerprints on.