These lines were born after the essay by Evgeniy Borovoy (peretz.agency/blog/story-behind-sv-group), founder of Peretz.agency — his text stirred up a whirlwind of long-forgotten pre-war memories, from our Kharkiv office «on the corner of Sumska and Vesnina»

Back then we didn't yet know how to appreciate what seemed like simple, almost invisible things, which today feel like a lost treasure: a live meeting instead of "plastic" on Zoom, the chance to look into someone's eyes and read between the lines instead of staring at a phone screen hoping to see a familiar face, that particular energy of a brainstorm that only appears when a team is physically gathered in one room

It isn't easy to pull the first thoughts and emotions of that acquaintance back to the surface — too many layers of years-long relationship have settled on top… But we'll try

Before Peretz

Before Peretz.agency we went through several developers: endless "check-ups", carloads of questionnaires and briefs. The only team whose completed projects genuinely "hooked" us was Vintage — but their price landed on the table long before any discussion of the site's concept, before we'd even defined the audience… and the conversation ended before it began

By the time we met Evgeniy's company, we were tired of this cycle and had almost given up on a new website. "We're a bit old-school anyway — a simple business-card site will do"

At first we were contacted by Peretz's second partner — a persistent, bold salesman (the best, as Zhenya himself put it), who brought us back to the idea that "the site had to happen". He was riding the wave of previous wins, very sure of himself — and, oddly, seemed superficial because of it. His first prototype — modern, "correct" from an SEO standpoint — was presented, but touched nothing inside us. The author didn't listen, and so didn't hear us. He was selling the project, not creating it — and pushed for an aggressive close with a "warm" client, without a substantial presentation of what idea the site carried, what its essence was, what it was meant to say to our customer. The reaction was a natural rejection — especially from our boss

Years later Zhenya would write in his own essay (peretz.agency/blog/story-behind-sv-group) about another prototype — his own, which he brought to the first meeting and never opened. For him, that became a conscious refusal: to act "honestly, rather than impressively"

The First Meeting

Then came a call from Evgeniy. He, too, started rather boldly — I, without paying it much attention, initially kept sabotaging attempts to schedule a meeting. But something caught. A liveliness… A life… Zhenya spoke — and lived it, while his partner had been selling… there was a colossal gap between the two of them

From that first meeting, we didn't remember the words — we remembered a look. The way he studied the engineering joints on our table: not out of politeness, but with recognition… as if he'd seen something familiar from another life. Later we understood — an engineering degree, his first profession…

In those early conversations you could sense an eagerness "to prove something" — as if something inside him said: others couldn't, but I can. I can offer them not a website, but a THING. Even though, in scale, the project promised nothing extraordinary

The Mirror

Then came countless meetings. Zhenya came back again and again, asking, digging in, thinking, pulling to the surface both our successes and our failures; together we recalled moments when a brilliant solution emerged from what had seemed like a dead end — a new joint, a new drawing, a new production process, a new stage of order approval. We drank coffee (I think we went through a couple of tanker-loads of it), we kept marveling at how another three hours had flown by, we were becoming one team…

And then, at one of the meetings, Zhenya brought a masterpiece. That wood-slice cross-section on the homepage — it was like a fingerprint, something out of the realm of DNA, carrying the imprint of the entire path SVgroup had walked. After that, the work took off — the site quickly came together like a single puzzle, logical pages appeared, a clear structure, a style that unmistakably conveyed our philosophy

We truly "took a good look" at Zhenya. Respect grew — for his work ethic, for the colossal amount of information he ploughed through, for the fact that he listened and remembered even the smallest details — he was learning our language instead of making us speak his. That's what settled it

Zhenya is still a "mini-factory" today: he says "I'll do it" — and simply goes and does it, without long conversations or waiting for the perfect moment

Evgeniy, in turn, "took a good look" at SV — and genuinely got drawn in. Because the boss really is unique: he fills everything he touches with meaning, he's a vector — doesn't always make it all the way to execution, but reads the direction unerringly, and has a rare nose for what's "not empty" in life

That's probably when Zhenya's phrase was born — "furniture neurosurgeons". Not the most elegant comparison. But probably the most accurate thing anyone's ever written about us. SVgroup and Peretz resonated. We saw a reflection of ourselves in each other — and it came down to how we each treated the project. Evgeniy lives it, digs into the story, examines other companies' mistakes and failures without indulgence.

We don't take on an order just to deliver it — we play out the future scenario of living with the piece we're building, trying it on as if we were the ones who'd live with it, not the client. Sometimes we argue ourselves hoarse over functional specifications, sometimes we get it wrong by pushing changes that end up reshaping the design. Often this whole project story happens at our own expense. But the result is an order we're proud of. An order the client brags about and passes on to friends, acquaintances, their children. We work with families on interior projects for decades — we get passed down from generation to generation

Our Own Identity

There's one more reason for the flow and flashes of synchronicity between our two companies. The whole story of the SVgroup website by Peretz is, at its core, a story of realizing our own identity. Zhenya writes about the same thing at the start of his essay. The project changed us, made us get to know ourselves

Only once you start telling the world about yourself — writing texts, for instance, working through a site's architecture — do you start asking the organization the right questions. Who are we. What are we about. Who are we for. And most importantly — what do we actually give the world. What is our core competence. What creates value as an added product

Zhenya would later write about the sequoias in California — how he stood by trees hundreds of years old and decided not to complicate the idea he'd already found, not to decorate something that was already honest. That resonates with us more than he probably realized. All our lives we've built spaces hand in hand with nature (natural wood slices, natural shades of color…) and we know this rule by feel: more complicated almost never means better. Sometimes the most professional work is knowing when to stop your own hand and let the work of the universe itself settle into someone's home

Peretz go so deep into the essence of a business that the website mostly becomes a byproduct… an artifact of the client company coming to understand itself. Peretz open up branches within a business, waking up things that already existed but had never been put into words

What did we come to understand by the end of the active phase of building the site? That our product isn't the wooden interiors we produce. Not even furniture-making itself. What we're really selling is care that doesn't let go — we raise a project like our own child, we don't step aside when an architect or a client runs into a problem at the seam between several contractors — builders, metalworkers, utilities people… we often take on the whole dialogue between them ourselves, and see the object through to completion on the wood side, while directing the adjacent work too. So that years later, if a client happens to catch sight of someone from our team on some street in a big city, they won't feel like crossing to the other side…))

Peretz doesn't sell websites. They dig into the essence of a business and pull out of the team an exact answer to three main questions: who we are, why we exist, and who we're for

ed. Sofya Shapko, Executive Director of SVgroup