132 Minutes With Jon Pichaya Ferry

The proprietor of Brooklyn's bones emporium promises it's not creepy to collect human remains

- By Bridget Read

The small bright showroom is tucked inside a graffiti-covered Bushwick warehouse. The furniture is mid-century modern. A bergamot-and-lavender candle is burning. “Our motivation was, How could we do things differently?” the young CEO in a blue chore coat says. The space is your typical direct-to-consumer start-up headquarters complete with earnest disrupter, except the products being disrupted aren’t sheets, mattresses, glasses, or bed frames. They are human bones: a tooth for $14, a vertebra for $50, a 19th-century skeleton for $6,600. On one wall hangs a massive collection of spines arranged in an ombré pattern; on the other, a Jo Malone diffuser sits atop a display case of skulls.

Jon “Jon Jon” Pichaya Ferry, a lanky 23-year-old, is shaking up the bones business. His company, JonsBones, sells “responsibly sourced human osteology,” a.k.a. human bones, and he wants to destigmatize a creepy industry, he says. He’s kind of a nü-goth bones-lifestyle influencer, greeting me at the appointment-only showroom one warm afternoon in May wearing a sterling-silver spinal-cord earring and a skull ring, which are available for purchase in the “Wearables” section of his sleek, Warby Parker–esque website.