Focus on Leadership: Sarah Templin manages Gensler’s sustainability standards using her background in textile design – Oct 2025
Interview by Kemp Harr
An industrial designer by trade, Sarah Templin serves as sustainable materials specialist and manager of the Gensler Product Sustainability (GPS) Standards. The Standards focus on reducing embodied carbon across 12 high impact product categories, including carpet tile, resilient, broadloom and ceramic. They are not proprietary to Gensler but serve as an open-source template for designers to assess material impacts.
Prior to her current role, Templin founded Sarah Templin Studios, a product and material design firm that specialized in reimagining material applications for housewares, soft goods and furniture for the circular economy, and taught design at both Maryland Institute College of Art and Parson’s School of Design-The New School. From 2008 to 2016, she served as principal and creative director for Radica Textiles, a handprinted textiles and housewares design label.
Templin lives in Baltimore on 130-year-old hardwood flooring with her husband, Bruce, and their toddler.
Q: Tell us about the early stages of your career path. Why did you choose Appalachian State and focus on textile design? How did that lead to your role at Gensler?
A: I’ve always been interested in textiles for the opportunities they afford-their drapability, their wide variety of functional characteristics, the challenge of turning a two-dimensional plane into a third dimension, and the feeling of flexing the brain while solving these challenges.
In college, I studied art management (which was basically a museum studies program), with a concentration in fibers studio classes. So, my explorations of textiles then were more geared towards sculpture than design, but this is when I got to dive deep into weaving, felting, dyeing, sewing and all the other processes that would later inform my design practice.
Q: What drove you to focusing your career on sustainable design and materials?
A: I pursued museum work for a while but always kept up the interest in textiles and soft goods on the side. I got more into screen printing yardage at this time, learning from friends and doing an apprenticeship at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Lots of trial and error. Lots of self-taught experimentation. I remember that a fiber shop in Asheville, North Carolina used to have a hotline you could call to ask for help when you were troubleshooting in your studio; I spent plenty of time on the phone with them, walking through all sorts of processes. And I got deep into the details of, essentially, the material culture of it all: how textiles machinery, geopolitics and geography shaped what was made. Eventually, I left the museum world to start Radica Textiles, which was launched with around ten different patterns I designed that were hand-painted or hand-printed on a cotton sateen.
Q: How did your experience running Radica Textiles shape your understanding of the interiors industry?
A: As the company grew, I experimented by getting help from sales reps, exhibiting at trade shows, tracing my supply chain, prototyping, maintaining as much local manufacturing as I could. These are common factors for so many manufacturers, but the specific challenges of smaller manufacturers are what still linger with me now that I am working on the Gensler Product Sustainability Standards (GPS). I spoke most days with two friends during this period, who also ran small manufacturing businesses, and together we would troubleshoot a lot of our challenges. Later, when I worked with manufacturers to help them use industrial design to reach their product-related sustainability goals, these small and mid-sized companies were a sweet spot again. I love the variety of brain gymnastics that are required for them every day. All these experiences collectively add up to the lens that I instinctively place on these conversations.
Now, for instance, we are conscientious to develop sustainability standards that make a meaningful difference in the industry while also supporting the sustainability goals of smaller manufacturers, rather than being an existential threat to their livelihood or only attainable by the largest companies.
Q: Can you explain the GPS Standards, and why they are so important to the design community?
A: The GPS Standard is a clear, open-source framework for designers to more holistically assess material impacts. GPS Standards establish sustainability performance criteria for the top 18 most used high-impact product categories selected for our architecture and interior projects. The criteria apply to projects in the U.S., Canada, EU and UK, with plans to expand to Gensler’s other regions in the coming years.
We have set clear baselines and goals that include carbon, health and lifecycle impacts that were designed to help every stakeholder-from manufacturers to clients-make healthy, regenerative product choices.
A critical function of GPS is the clear market signal it sends to the manufacturers we work with, and we see its effects in the market. Our team of about 25 colleagues have assessed well over 5,500 products for compliance. We have trained over 1,500 colleagues and 1,500 manufacturers on understanding and analyzing sustainability metrics and documents, creating a workforce that can confidently request and assess sustainability metrics.
Also important to us is that GPS promotes industry-wide criteria by sharing our criteria openly and encouraging alignment around common standards. We have been an active partner of the Common Materials Framework for the past several years, working with the industry to coalesce around one set of material requests to the industry.
Q: Tell our readers why Gensler and, specifically, Diane Hoskins have taken such a leadership role in reducing the carbon footprint within the built environment.
A: In 2019, our former co-CEO (now co-board chair) Diane Hoskins addressed the UN and promise to ensure that every building in our portfolio is net zero carbon by 2030.
We recognize that our size creates both responsibility and an opportunity. We have been working on driving down the operational carbon of our projects for quite a while, and the Gensler Product Sustainability Standard is a critical step in reducing the embodied carbon.
Q: What are the five impact attributes that Gensler chose as a basis for its GPS matrix that’s used to compare suppliers and their products? How were they chosen?
A: Gensler has published product-level criteria in five categories: Organizational Commitments, Multi-attribute Certifications, Life-Cycle Impacts, Indoor Air Impacts, and Material Health and Transparency. We chose these to create a holistic view of a product, one that does not prioritize one sustainability metric at the expense of the others. We were also conscientious to choose criteria that are in alignment with initiatives by industry organizations, regulatory standards and third-party certifications because we know that aligning with industry-wide sustainability efforts creates the strongest, clearest market signal to manufacturers. In particular, we are collaborating with Mindful Materials on the ongoing development of the Common Material Framework to ensure consistency across the industry for a unified ask for sustainability disclosures.
Q: How did Gensler choose the specific product types that it decided to focus on when it developed the GPS Standards? I’ve noticed there are four flooring categories in the mix.
A: We target the high-impact product categories, and we identify them by checking a few different indicators. A Gensler research grant initially helped us assess the embodied carbon of common A&D product types. We also looked at products that we use in especially high volumes, those that are in nearly every project we build. And we add a layer of research on market-readiness to ensure that the product category can implement criteria. Some product categories don’t have a culture of reporting and disclosure, so criteria wouldn’t yet be an appropriate way to effect change for them. The types of products that ranked relatively high in all these categories are the ones where we saw the biggest opportunity for our focus.
Q: Where do you see the most progress being made in sustainable flooring?
A: It’s been interesting to see an uptick in companies asking us about circularity: how to track it, how to make it profitable or at least not a huge expense, what their options are. We’ll all be keeping a close eye on how the new waste diversion requirements coming out of California and
New York will impact manufacturing. So many people are experimenting with ways to make it work, coming at it from many directions, and it feels that we’re closing in on a tipping point.
Q: What are the biggest challenges manufacturers face when trying to improve transparency?
A: The most common challenge we see is cost, which won’t surprise anyone. The cost of EPDs and other transparency documents adds up for big companies and can be prohibitive for small and medium-sized companies. We try to work with industries and manufacturers to understand their options; if you can’t afford EPDs, can you participate in an industry-wide EPD? Can you discuss in your firm-wide sustainability action plan how you are benchmarking and improving upon your carbon metrics? These might not help you with global warming potential compliance, but the bigger picture is creating a culture of transparency around products and where corporations are on the sustainability path.
Q: How do you balance your teaching career, your entrepreneurial textile/upholstery business and role at Gensler as the point person for the firm’s product standards?
A: I love teaching, but for now that is funneled into advising a student here and there on their thesis project, developing GPS resources for a wide variety of learning types inside and outside of Gensler, and annoying my husband with
“curricula” (making movie and book lists) in preparation for a trip. All independent entrepreneurial enterprises have been put aside, and, instead, the entrepreneurial spirit lives on when I’m working with our manufacturers to understand their challenges and opportunities.
Q: Who are your mentors, and what did they teach you?
A: A current mentor of mine, Katie Mesia, gave me a framework that I use in all sorts of areas of my life from big, complex projects with many stakeholders and KPIs all the way down to cleaning the house: identify the things you can do that make the biggest impact with the lowest effort and start there. For a complicated project, I would literally map it out on an X- and Y-axis of impact and effort. It’s a consistently clarifying tool.
Q: What do you do for fun when you aren’t focused on the work you do at Gensler?
A: This weekend, my husband has an opening for a show he curated. I’m going running with a friend, hitting up three birthday parties, strolling over to the neighborhood bakery and hunting for cicadas with my bug-focused toddler. n