Janji

Janji was founded on May 3, 2012, by David Spandorfer and Michael Burnstein while they were students at Washington University in St. Louis. The company's original name was Edele, but the founders dropped it after customers repeatedly mispronounced it or confused it with the singer Adele; they replaced it with Janji, the Malay word for 'promise.' The brand launched its first products, shirts and shorts designed around the flags of Haiti and Kenya, at a single running store, Big River Running in St. Louis, before growing into a standalone apparel company now based in Boston. Janji's core mechanism ties every purchase to water access: a share of proceeds from apparel sales funds clean-water projects run by partner nonprofits including Water.org, Living Water International, MSABI and DIGDEEP, in countries such as Haiti, Kenya, Peru, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ethiopia. The apparel itself stays within performance running gear, shirts, shorts and related running kit, rather than expanding into general athletic wear, keeping the product line tied closely to the running-community customer base the brand was built for.