Sina Pearson's Next Act

After running her own textile company for 25 years, the designer is now bringing her brand and inimitable creative process to Momentum Group.

- Avinash Rajagopal

For a full week every month, Sina Pearson flies out from New York City to Seattle, and transforms into a gardener. “My happiest moments are when I get out there and it’s 40 degrees and drizzling,” the textile designer says. “I can put on my Polartec gardening clothes and my Birkenstock plastic clogs, and tromp around in the garden and feel wet.” Pearson’s namesake textile company was acquired last year by Momentum Group, so she spends the rest of the month at Momentum’s minimalist showroom on New York’s Park Avenue. “It’s like left brain, right brain,” she says, insisting that pulling up weeds in Seattle and marking up fabric samples in New York are really two versions of the same mind-set of constant tweaking and iterating. “In the design process, you have to just let the fabric be what it wants to be. You can’t fight it. The same thing with gardening—if you plant something and it dies, it was never meant to be there.”

Pearson has something of a genius for bringing external influences into her long career, in which she has served as president and design director at Unika Vaev, co-founded the Association for Contract Textiles (ACT), and started her own textile company. Ideas drawn from her heritage (Swedish), travels (in person and through books and websites), and yes, gardening have figured prominently in the hundreds of high-performance contract textiles she has created over the years. They also helped shape her latest work—the Hi-Tech Overshot collection, which was unveiled at NeoCon this year.