Hello. Welcome to Bon Brun.

If you’ve made it far enough into this website to find this page, I’m grateful to have your attention. A big part of why I wanted to become an entrepreneur was simply to create something that people value.

When I was about 20 years old, I considered a career in hospitality. I spent a summer working as a server at BLVD in Beverly Hills and loved the feeling of taking care of people and contributing to an experience they would remember. This came after two internships in a large corporate office, where I learned that I struggled with the idea of spending my life in front of a computer. Almost twenty years later, I still struggle with this.

I recently graduated from the Executive MBA program at Kellogg, my second degree from Northwestern. It is a program full of extraordinarily accomplished people, and one of the things that surprised me was how many of us were still trying to figure out what we wanted the next part of our lives to look like. People had successful careers, families, impressive titles and enormous capability, yet plenty of us were asking some version of the same question: is this really what I want to keep doing?

I work in digital analytics. Before that, much of my work was in marketing, which interested me because I like understanding how people think, what they respond to and why certain things matter to them. AI changed the field rapidly enough that it forced me to think harder about what I was actually good at, what I enjoyed doing and what kind of work I wanted to spend the next twenty years pursuing.

One of the more uncomfortable realizations I’ve had is that being capable doesn’t mean very much by itself. Eventually you have to do something with it. You have to make decisions before you have all the information, risk being wrong and trust yourself enough to build something that doesn’t exist yet. During my last semester at Kellogg, I finally found language for something that had been sitting in the background for years: I am unusually comfortable creating something from nothing, and more confidently than I would have said it a few years ago, I am a designer. I’ve just never had the right medium to make a career out of it.

For a while, houses became that medium. On my first remodel in Seattle, I tore down nearly the entire interior of the house. Once the walls, ceilings and finishes were gone, there was a point where it was a bit scary to look around at what I had done. I pushed through because I could already see what the house could become, and I loved watching that vision slowly turn into something real. What I enjoyed most were the hundreds of small problems that came with it. Old houses do not give you a clean set of instructions, and every room had something strange about it that I had to study, understand and solve on my own. 

I also learned something less satisfying from that experience. I had created a home that I loved, but I had tied up the majority of our money in doing it. The form was beautiful, but financially it had reduced our flexibility and taken capital that could have been working toward our family’s future. That tension stayed with me because, like most people with a family and responsibilities, I am constantly evaluating form, function and value. There are things I love that simply are not worth the cost, and there are practical decisions that make sense even when they are not the ones I would choose if money were irrelevant.

That experience made me think differently about where I wanted to direct my instinct to design. I still wanted to create things with beauty and intention, but I wanted the work itself to contribute to my family’s future rather than compete with it. Bon Brun became an opportunity to put that same obsessive energy into something that could create value beyond my own home.

I do not think beauty is frivolous. I read a quote somewhere that "great design lifts the spirit and calms the soul". The spaces and objects we live with every day affect us, even when we are not consciously thinking about them, and there is real value in making ordinary parts of life feel considered. With Bon Brun, I have the opportunity to treat form as part of the function rather than something that has to be negotiated away. If the purpose of the product is to make a small daily ritual feel more special, then the way it looks, feels and lives in your home is part of what it is supposed to do.

That idea eventually found its way into coffee, although coffee matters to me for reasons that have very little to do with caffeine. My favorite coffee is actually the one I have in the afternoon. After several hours of meetings, my wife gets home with the kids, they usually disappear downstairs, and before dinner, homework, baths and everything else begins, we have a small window where the day seems to stop moving quite so quickly. I make her a latte, make something for myself, and we sit on the couch for a little while.

It is not a grand ritual, and that is precisely why I care about it. We spend so much of our lives pursuing something that exists in the future: a career we want, a business we want to build, a home, financial security, something better for our children. There is nothing wrong with ambition, and I have plenty of it, but our lives are still happening while we are working toward all of those things. Those twenty minutes on the couch are part of the life we’re working so hard to build.

Thank you for your business. I hope you stick around to be part of our growth.

Jonathon