It's finally June, our favourite month of the year. Why? First off it's the inspiration behind our brand name JUNN (pron. June). Second the snow has melted and the warm Summer festive season is just around the corner. Lastly it's the founders shared birthday month and the birthday of the brand all rolled into one. So happy 8th JUNN-iversary to us! We thought what perfect way to celebrate than to do a little founder journey of how we got to this point. So here we go.....
It all started 20 years ago, Natasha and Rupa met as students in undergrad and became best friends within seconds. Years later, while building careers in completely different industries, we kept coming back to the same idea: we wanted to create something of our own. Something more creative, more hands-on, and more connected to people and our culture.
2018: Rupa and Natasha launched a fashion brand Live The Collective.
At the beginning, it was honestly just a passion project. No real understanding of what we were doing or getting ourselves into. Our first “showroom” was a tiny nook inside Rupa’s apartment with a shower curtain and Ikea racks. We hosted weekend trunk shows, sourced designers late at night to give us newbies a chance, packed orders by hand, and slowly started building a client base one appointment at a time.
2019: What started with three designers quickly grew into wedding shows, trunk shows, new partnerships, a trip to India for fashion week and in turn building a growing community locally and with the design world in India.
2020: Then the pandemic hit and like everyone else, we had no idea what was next. But surprisingly, it pushed us to grow even more. People couldn’t travel anymore, and we realized there was a real need for a trusted local experience for South Asian fashion here locally. So we built a small home based showroom and expanded.
2021: While still working our full time careers in healthcare, it was two solo entrepeneurs running it all bootstrapped on little fuel and no guidance. Accounting, website, social media, packing, shipping, client calls, orders, brand partnership deals. You name it, we self learned and we did it!
2022: We didn't know what was about to hit us. All that steam had come to a head and it was working. It was our BEST SALES YEAR ever! We had clients almost every day. Orders on orders. New celebrity, clients and collaborations. Expanding our network into the USA!
2023: After years of growing the business organically, we evolved into a full showroom experience, tripling our brand partnerships, and expanding a community network that became way bigger than we ever imagined....until it wasn't :(
2024: This steam had finally run out. After our best sales year ever we hit a wall. We couldn't keep up with demand. We stopped having the capacity and drive to get clients in, answer messages, creativity was at an all time low. We considered shutting it all down
2025: A little glimmer of hope came on one founder conversation, one random day. We asked eachother: do we quit? or do we go all in? Neither of us wanted to stop. We took a deep dive into what would make us happy and we came to a realization:
This brand was never just about clothes. It was about culture, celebration, creativity, confidence, and community. And we could NOT stop and lose all that we had built.
That’s what led us to the decision to rebrand, start from the ground up AGAIN! And that meant making serious time for this in a very SERIOUS way. So we got to work. Hundreds of hours each week, countless sleepless nights and hustled hard.
2026: After months of planning, we launched our new website in January 2026 with a new name, new identitity and new found energy. JUNN represents a new chapter for us, something more intentional, more elevated, and more connected to the lifestyle, esthetics, customer service and community we’ve been building all along. We expanded our offerings and broke down barriers, like styling services and size-inclusive options. The name is not only an ode to our birth month of June: a season of warmth, celebration, anticipation, but really marks a new beginnings for us.
We still can’t believe how far this little passion project has come. With no playbook or industry secrets, we feel so proud of the platform. And best part is with this re-birth of the brand we feel like we are just getting started.
