The clothing we wear has a story—a journey from soil to garment that connects farmers, designers, and ecosystems. Yet, in today’s textile industry, those connections are often invisible, buried beneath layers of mass production and global supply chains. Laura Sansone, founder of New York Textile Lab, envisions a different kind of system: one where fibers carry the identity of the land they come from, and where the people behind each step of the process are valued and seen.
Through her work with New York Textile Lab, Sansone is creating pathways to a more regenerative and localized textile future. By fostering relationships between fiber producers and designers, she’s building an ecosystem rooted in transparency, care, and regional identity. It’s a model that challenges the extractive norms of traditional textile systems, offering instead a vision of interdependence and regenerative textile economies.
In this Q&A, Sansone shares how New York Textile Lab has grown from its early days as an experimental teaching space in a farmers market to a hub for Climate Beneficial™ fibers and cooperative innovation. She reflects on the challenges of working within a bioregional framework, the opportunities to reimagine value in the textile industry, and her hopes for a future defined by abundance and reciprocity.
Fibershed: Can you tell us about the history of New York Textile Lab and how it functions today?
Laura Sansone: New York Textile Lab began as a partnership with GrowNYC’s Greenmarkets, an extensive farmers market system in New York City. Back then, I was living in upstate New York, working with organic cotton and natural dyes, and experimenting with products that could decompose back into the soil—what Fibershed later coined as “soil-to-soil” production.
I started teaching out of the Greenmarket, using a mobile workstation we called the “Textile Lab.” My students and I explored how food and textile systems could be interdependent, making natural dyes and working with wool. One key lesson was how much trust and transparency exist in small market systems. At the Greenmarket, you see the farmer every week, and you know where your food comes from. I wanted to recreate that sense of connection and trust for textiles and clothing.
Today, New York Textile Lab is a design and consulting company. I work with designers who want to source regional, Climate Beneficial™ materials, and I also run a purchasing cooperative, the New York Carbon Farm Network. Through this cooperative, designers and small brands can directly access fibers and collaborate to create yarn. My goal has always been to empower designers to connect with the beginning of the textile value chain—starting with the farms.
Fibershed: How many designers have you worked with, and do they generally align with your slow-growth ethos from the word “go”?
Laura: I’ve worked closely with about 10 to 15 designers, but many others cross my path. Often, I direct them to larger national programs because our regional capacity is limited. Our cooperative model is rooted in slow, regenerative growth. It’s about respecting the capacity of our local farms and ensuring that growth happens organically, modeled after natural systems.
I only work with people who align with this ethos. Consulting jobs are great—they support my business—but I want to work with those who genuinely believe in the mission. Over the last 10 years, I’ve seen a shift. More designers and brands are embracing thoughtful, regenerative practices. Some aren’t ready financially or logistically, but many return when they are, which reflects the growing demand for sustainable systems.
I mostly work with startups, small brands, and independent designers—that’s my wheelhouse. I’m not particularly interested in working with corporations because their models are often misaligned with the principles of bioregionalism and slow growth.
Fibershed: For fiber producers and farmers, what are the benefits of participating in a program like yours?
Laura: We work with a range of farmers whose needs vary. Some already have established pathways to market, like selling at farmers markets or running online yarn stores. For them, joining our program offers additional benefits, like Climate Beneficial™ verification or technical assistance. They might sell us a portion of their fiber while keeping the rest for their own channels, which aligns with our goal of creating a distributed economic model involving many farms.
Other farmers primarily sell meat and don’t have the time or resources to market their fiber. For them, producing regional yarn is often too expensive, so we provide a wholesale marketing channel. We pay well above commodity prices for the coarser wool common in the Northeast, offering growers more than they’d typically receive from mills or traditional markets. The cooperative model eliminates intermediaries, allowing designers to buy directly and ensuring fair prices for everyone involved.
Fibershed: You’ve mentioned the importance of place in your work. Can you talk about how the qualities of your region shape the fiber and the designs it inspires?
Laura: There’s a spirit of place that comes through in the production we’re doing. Here in the Northeast, we’re part of a bioregion with small farms, a wetter climate, and unique fiber characteristics. For example, farmers here often raise long-wool breeds like Romney sheep, which provide coarser wool. This is very different from drier regions like California, where finer wools like Merino and Rambouillet are more common.
When I started working with local mills, I saw that much of the wool was Romney or similar long-wool types. Designers were asking for local fiber, so we began blending Romney wool with alpaca, which is abundant in our region. Alpaca fiber is highly regarded, comes in beautiful natural colors, and can soften the coarser wool, making it more appealing to designers. This kind of blending reflects the resources and character of this place.
I often ask, “What does a New York sweater look like?” We know what an Icelandic or Irish fisherman’s sweater looks like, but there’s no equivalent for New York. My designs aim to capture the utilitarian essence of our region: functional, long-lasting garments that honor the resources and labor behind them.
Fibershed: What do the next few years—or even the next decade—look like for New York Textile Lab and your work?
Laura: I’m focusing on building out my brand more. For years, I’ve been consumed with activist work, but sales are essential to supporting my business, so expanding my brand is a priority.
For the Carbon Farm Network, I’d like to double our cooperative membership to around 10 members while increasing our fiber volume. The USDA Climate Beneficial Fiber Partnership grant ends in three years, so we’re using this time to grow our interconnected ecosystem of farms, designers, and markets. I also want to bring on a dedicated carbon farm planner to focus on the agricultural side and build a foundation of knowledge for the next generation.
Fibershed: Have you thought about how what you’re building could serve as a pattern for others or how it might spread?
Laura: Absolutely. As a Fibershed affiliate, I’d love to see neighboring Fibersheds connect to what we’re doing. I think of growth as branching out horizontally, like a fractal—spreading naturally into adjacent regions.
Neighboring Fibersheds could enroll farms in carbon farm planning and either sell into our cooperative market or establish their own. The beauty of being adjacent is that fibers could move back and forth between ecosystems, creating interconnected systems that retain their regional identities. This kind of decentralized, adaptive growth mirrors natural systems and ensures expansion without losing the model’s essence.
Fibershed: If you could imagine an ideal fiber future, free from any limiting factors, what would it look and feel like?
Laura: My ideal fiber future would be one where we collectively embody a deep sense of stewardship for the land, the animals, and the people who generate our clothing and textiles. To get there, we need to shift how we value things. Right now, our systems are built on a scarcity model. But if we could transition to a world rooted in abundance—where we truly see and respect the deep value of what we create and consume—it would change everything.
Living in that kind of future would feel like stepping into a world of abundance, where our systems don’t just take but also give back. Circularity is at the heart of this shift. The carbon cycle, the ultimate system of reciprocity, shows us how to give back to the earth.
If every person could engage with this concept, even in small ways, we’d be moving in the right direction. It’s about finding our role in this interconnected system and contributing to a future that respects the balance between people, the planet, and the fibers we use. That’s the world I want to help create.