Marteen Allen
Young Textile
Professionals Texpert
Marteen Allen is the founder and principal designer of Studio Jeannot, a New York-based textile design studio she launched in 2022 after more than a decade working in-house at mills, fabric houses, and design companies. Her career spans print, jacquard, embroidery, and wallcovering categories, with experience developing textiles in studios and mills across multiple continents.
Before founding the studio, Marteen led textile product development for high-end home furnishings brands, collaborating with global partners to bring trend-forward collections to market. She came to textiles through a background in painting and graphic design, and that cross-disciplinary sensibility continues to shape her work today, blending painterly experimentation with strategic development.
Studio Jeannot is MWBE-certified and partners with independent brands, jobbers, interior designers, architects, weavers, and manufacturers on custom and collection-based designs. The studio’s work has been featured in Business of Home, Wallpaper, Architectural Digest, The World of Interiors, and Surface Magazine. Since 2021, Marteen has also taught in the Textile/Surface Design Department at FIT, her alma mater, and mentors emerging designers through the Female Design Council’s mentor match program.
Texpert Advice
1. What career opportunity, challenge, or decision had the biggest impact on your professional growth, and what did it teach you?
Leaving in-house work to found Studio Jeannot in 2022. It had been dancing in the back of my mind for a long time before I actually did it, one of those things you know you want long before you're ready to admit it. It taught me that the career I wanted wasn't going to just show up. I had to create it myself.
2. Looking back at the beginning of your career, what is one piece of advice you wish someone had given you, and how would it have changed your path?
Value your work. Not in a presumptuous way, but literally. When you love what you do and it feels like play, it's easy to fall into "I'd do this for free," and that mindset doesn't hold up over a career. I wish someone had told me early on that loving the work and charging what it's worth aren't in conflict.
3. What is the most valuable professional lesson you've learned through a setback or mistake, and how has it shaped the way you lead today?
A client relationship early in my studio's life taught me what it costs to not protect yourself upfront. A working relationship can start on good terms and still go sideways, and without a contract in place, you have no real recourse when it does. It taught me to lead with clarity and transparency about who I am and how I operate from the very first conversation, and to never take on work without a contract again.
4. What changes or opportunities do you see shaping the future of the home furnishings and textile industry, and what skills should emerging professionals focus on to prepare?
New technology tends to push things in a pendulum, and right now I think we're swinging back toward wanting more human warmth in the work, the same thing that happened when CAD entered the industry and hand-painting suddenly felt endangered. I think that pattern is repeating. The skill worth focusing on isn't picking a side. It's blending human warmth with tech savvy, using new tools with intention instead of leaning on any one skillset alone.