EcoZeal

Jungmaven offers hemp clothing at affordable prices.

Rob Jungmann got into hemp in college – big time.

The 39-year-old founder of Jungmaven, a company specializing in blank and embellished 100% hemp and hemp blend T-shirts, began selling hemp as a business venture while a student at Central Washington University. It was in the early 90’s, and he and some friends had gotten their hands on some surplus hemp fabric from Eastern Europe. It had been manufactured for the Russian military, but after the fall of the Soviet Union had never reached its destination. Instead, Jungmann and his college buddies started making wallets.

“We were sewing them in my best friend’s mom’s attic and dying them in the washing machine,” Jungmann recollects. Somehow MTV caught wind of the hemp Chenga wallets and placed an order for a thousand of them. “So I had to find a supplier (for more fabric).”

A History of Concern for the Environment

Jungmann’s early outdoors experiences with his family sparked his passion for and awareness of the environment. “We moved from Phoenix to Seattle when I was 13,” he explains. “We were a big camping family; we’d go hiking in the summer. Back in the 80’s and 90’s they were doing a lot of clearcutting in the whole state of Washington. We’d go back to a place we’d camped at the year before, and it would just be gone. It’s no fun hiking in clearcut.”

In college, Jungmann pursued an environmental studies major, which made him even more aware of how human enterprise affects the environment. So when the hemp industry emerged as a career path, he didn’t have to think too hard about choosing it. “The more I found out about hemp, and the fact that it was illegal, I just decided, I need to do this.”

Patriarch of Hemp

As young as Jungmann is, he is an old hand in the American hemp industry. He attended the very first Hemp Industry Association meeting in 1994 “at a pretty young age.” In the mid 90’s he consulted with and made items for the American Hemp Mercantile, then the largest importer and distributor of hemp in North America. In the meantime, his company, Manastash, took off. Jungmann spent several years selling his Chinese-produced embellished hemp T-Shirts in Japan at outdoors and extreme sports events. In 2007, after a brief stint in Costa Rica, Jungmann brought the company back to Santa Barbara, CA under a new name – Jungmaven.

Jungmann’s Mission

Jungmann is a man with a mission. He would like to see everyone in the U.S. wearing hemp. “We’re very focused right now with just T-shirts, trying to keep the price down. We enjoy the challenge of introducing a textile that can really help the environment.”

You can find Jungmaven blank T-shirts, thermals, polos and sweatshirts, along with tops embellished with the very distinctive artwork of Jungmann and his team, at select retailers or by going to the Jungmaven site, http://www.twojupiters.com/.