Steven John: What's your background in sports and the outdoors, and how and when did you decide to parlay these passions into a business?

Dave Spandorfer: We started Janji, actually, on the bus ride to the Division III Track Championship meet going into my senior year in college. The short answer is I was… well, I'll tell you the long answer first. I was a history major. I was an international business major. I had no experience with clothing or in the sporting industry, but when the idea of Janji took hold on that bus ride, it was really something that [my business partner and I] couldn't let go of.

The next steps after that were we applied for a business planning competition that we won at our school and we got an A on a class project to start our own business. Those two things in concert at Washington University in St. Louis all gave us the funding, but also the confidence to get Janji off the ground, and we've been doing it ever since.

It's the only job I've ever had outside of working at a running store, which I did in the early startup period to help get really acquainted with the market and the customer, and really just generally with this fun but also in many ways challenging industry.

SJ: Did you personally grow up always as a runner?

DS: I started running in high school, certainly played sports all my life. Then when I realized I was going to max out at 5'7”, 130, I realized when I was playing football or lacrosse, it just wasn't really going to take hold in the same way that running did. I was just lucky enough to find [running].

SJ: What were the early day of the company like?

DS: Fun, naive, interesting. It was us very much trying to figure out how to start a clothing business after my co-founder was an urban studies major, right? See this level of understanding of where we were at. We were, in those early days, we would literally apply the hang tag to every single item. We would hand pick and ship out every item ourselves. Over time, we realized that it's okay to delegate a few things. We also, frankly, learned to create better product.

The product that we created in the early days, while I still wear the original shorts that we made nine years ago, the product has taken massive, massive leaps forward in every imaginable way. That really comes from hiring people who are a lot smarter, better, certainly more equipped to deal with making great products than I have the capacity, or really the ability, to do.

I still love product. I love touching and feeling clothing, and I definitely still love seeing people wearing Janji gear. That's a feeling that I hope never gets old, but the business has certainly taken a big evolution ever since we brought on the right people to help make it what it is.

SJ: I know there's a name change in the early years – how did you settle on the name Janji for the brand?

DS: Well, Janji means “promise” in Indonesian Malay, and the original name was Edele, which it is, if you're reading it, it's hard to pronounce. Also, the singer Adele was just hitting her stride at the moment. Now today, people will confuse it with Jumanji. We didn't realize they'd be making remakes of the original Robin Williams movie, several sequential ones. But we loved the bounciness of Janji. We loved the originality of the name. No one really confuses it with anyone else, [it’s] super memorable.

Then lastly, we loved the origin. We loved this idea of we're rooted in this promise of making the world a better place through running. It's something that has just been a core guiding principle since we got Janji started on day one and is something that we think about in every decision that we make as a business.

SJ: Why has expanding clean water access always been such a major part of the company's goal and identity?

DS: As I mentioned, the original idea for Janji came on the bus ride to a track meet. In that track meet, it was actually a really fricking hot day. It was the hottest recorded day in Cleveland, of all places, for the month of May. I was running the 10K and the 5K, and during the 10K there were people literally spraying us down with water on both ends of the track. You know intuitively that you need water for running. You need it when you're running in July and you need it when you're running something as long as a marathon. But the reality is it's not easily accessible – potable [water] is not an option for a lot of people. This really was crystallized when, back when I was in college, I would tutor Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees, and many of whom had major access issues growing up with a lack of safe, reliable drinking water.

Tying in this experience when I was in school, and tying in this idea of the necessity of running and water sort of married together to form what is at the crux of our mission. Now that mission, it's evolved over time. I think, as we think about running, we think about the universality of running. Running can be this source, this connective tissue that binds people, whether you live in Boston like we do, or Bangalore, right? You can find people who run. It's something that's amazing about this sport, and water is, of course, also something that is natural, universal, that you need to have – it’s the sustenance of life.

We wanted to make sure that we had this oriented mission that's carried us, basically, since day one. We're doing a bit more around sustainability and access to water and doing things, like in the American Southwest today, where we are working to give running water to communities, frankly, that have never had it before. Which, when we look at the grandness of America and the wealth here, it's unbelievable that's the case.

It has evolved to be [like that]. We'll do something globally, and now we're doing it in many ways more locally and doing more around climate change, water access, indefinite water access, as we grow, change, and continue to see the problem evolve.

SJ: What is the process like for selecting a new piece of apparel that's going to be added for the brand? From idea, to development, to testing, to execution, what's the process you guys think: “We're going to add something new.”

DS: I think the idea is that, is there room in the market for something new, right? I think we want to be able to build something and create something that's not duplicative of what else is out there and really take the own Janji lines. Our mission is to create paths, to allow runners to explore, connect, and create change. If we just do something exactly like what everyone else is doing, then we don't do it. At its core, we look at it differently in that way. We want to say: "All right, here's this. We know there's a big need for a lightweight yet sort of heavier jacket that is easy to travel with and you can wear while you're running, hiking, and seeing the world." So, lo and behold, we create the Thermal Zephyr Jacket.

Now we have a whole product development cycle. We have our head of product. We have a whole testing crew [that] we call our field map team. There are global travelers, runners, adventurers, and then we work with our Janji Collective members to do some more wear testing for sort of those four, five mile runs. If you're in Seattle or Bozeman or Miami, right, we want to make sure we're getting a diversity of testing.

In terms of how we select the countries and the places where we're inspired by, we're looking for three core things. Number one, is there basically a need for what we're doing, right? We're not trying to make the Sweden or Oslo line because there's not exactly a big need there. Number two, can we find some place where that is under-explored or underrepresented? We're not trying to do the same thing, as I mentioned, that everyone else is doing.

Having a line that is inspired by something that's, say, a traditional tourist trap, doesn't necessarily have that same appeal. We want to be able to showcase that the best way to see the world is through running and through inspiring people to visit those places.

Then number three is, can we find a phenomenal group of artists and tell their stories? That could be Christian Gering for our American Southwest line. He's a Santa Fe artist, he's an Indigenous American, and he's also not only a fantastic designer, but he also is a great ultra-runner. He can test the wear, experience the brand.