Persistent and Enduring

Although there was no way to predict the distinctive trajectory and wonderfully accomplished pathway of her career, Susan Lyons should have suspected some exciting outcomes when she focused her art school senior thesis on the fusion of art and commerce in contemporary culture. It only gets better from there. As part of the thesis project, she and some classmates started, grew, and then sold a t-shirt printing company; she worked for an industrial textile mill in India, learning and appreciating the convergence of culture and craft; and she even started a successful collaboration with the renowned architect Bill McDonough by cold calling his office. 

In the near future, Susan Lyons will step aside from her role as the president of Designtex, one of the world’s leading textile design and manufacturing companies, a role she has held there for more than 10 years. Going forward she’ll have fewer meetings on her schedule, but she won’t be stepping away from her profession as a designer. “It’s always been about making things for me, the intersection of manufacturing and art.” 

That combination of beauty and utility had an additional element that has been a central part of her life for as long as she can remember. “My mother was a very, very serious recycler in her day, actually way before her time. So, we were always taught that waste was an issue. She was a depression child, so waste was the greatest sin you could ever commit. So probably just those sensibilities coming to bear, but also just recognizing that maybe there’s a better way to think about how to make things led me to focus on sustainability. It wasn’t even called that back then.” 

It was the early 1990s. Lyons was the Director of Design at Designtex, her first stint at the same company she would return to lead in 2012. It wasn’t possible to do online searches to learn about who was leading any efforts around environmentally responsible manufacturing, especially in the complex production processes of textiles. A chance reading of a Wall Street Journal story about William McDonough from a discarded issue on a business flight was a starting point. The story highlighted a project McDonough had completed in Poland where he convinced a group of developers to plant 10,000 acres of trees to offset the greenhouse gases resulting from their development project. She called McDonough at his New York office, they met, she absorbed the ideas that propelled his cradle-to-cradle thinking, and her commitment to sustainably making textiles became a centerpiece of her career. The concepts she embraced have come to be called the “circular economy”, but for Lyons it would simply become the way she would lead Designtex into the future. 

She would have some additional achievements before assuming the helm at Designtex a dozen years ago, operating her own studio for four years, and then a post as Creative Director of Materials at Herman Miller, now MillerKnoll, for about six years. Her career never wavered, however, from a focus on integrating creativity, innovation, and sustainability.  

And as she moves on from her leadership role at Designtex, she is proud of what the contract textiles industry has achieved in advancing sustainable practices, especially proud, in fact, of some new and foundational achievements that are just now emerging and being introduced by her company. Designtex has owned for over ten years a digital printing company in Portland, Maine. “It is basically run by artists, and it’s just an incredible facility full of creativity and imagination.” Working with that talent over a multi-year period, Lyons has led the development of an entirely new capability at Designtex, a capability for designers and specifiers to have access to a whole new level of customization. “It offers the marketplace a just in time manufacturing model. So, we’re trying to move away from making something that we ‘hope’ will sell, then put it on the shelf and ‘hope’ that it sells. And instead, we’re moving toward a model that says that if somebody wants something, we’re going to make it just for them. And in the quantity they need. It offers the design community an incredible opportunity to basically put their stamp on their projects, and it enables them to visualize their creative ideas for their clients. We’re very much about offering the design community a toolkit to amplify their creativity.” And she’s extremely excited about the potential in this platform. 

Not surprisingly, this new Designtex capability doesn’t just turbocharge creative potential. It also supports a whole new level of sustainability and the circular economy that Lyons has persistently pushed all these years. After all, if textiles are only created in small quantities and for specific projects, there is a significant reduction of waste at so many levels — raw materials, production processes, energy consumption, storage, distribution costs, etc. It’s clear that the convergence of design and sustainability has been and continues to be at the core of her body of work all these years. 

And next. “I’d kind of like to maybe just go back to a little bit of a design practice and kind of flex those muscles a little bit more directly from time to time. I bought a house in Hudson Valley, so I’m hoping to spend a lot of time up there and maybe learn how to garden. Yeah, I don’t know. And some volunteer work, maybe be a little teaching. I don’t know. I don’t really have a master plan at this point.” 

One thing seems all but certain, Susan Lyons will continue to fuse her urge to make things, her imaginative pursuit of the consilience of beauty and creativity, and her unwavering commitment to the most expansive meanings of sustainability. Her industry is vastly better for her years of contributions.