Krissy Jones’s Sky Ting has been New York’s yoga studio of choice for It Girls since it opened in Chinatown in 2015. Her clients have ranged from singer Phoebe Bridgers to former Vogue editors such as Sally Singer and Carine Roitfeld. After buying out the two partners who helped start it, Jones, 35, is opening a new location, her first since taking full control of the company. “I’m in a period of rebuilding,” she tells me as we walk through her new, massive studio space in NoHo.
Jones grew up in Portage, Indiana, with two brothers. “We were a sports family,” says Jones, who always preferred the arts. She started dancing around age three. “It was like Dance Moms. My mom hated it and was like, ‘Why can’t you play softball?’” But Jones, who felt like an outsider at home, loved her dance studio. “It gave me sisters.”
In 2007, she enrolled in Pittsburgh’s Point Park University. “It was second to Juilliard for dance, and I was probably the worst one at the school,” she says. “There were signs in the bathroom that said, LADIES, IF YOU HAVE TO PURGE DO SO IN THE TOILETS.” Plus, “there were no dudes that I wanted to make out with.” She transferred to Indiana University after her freshman year.
There, “the cool, older dancers were going to yoga,” so Jones went with them. “I liked that it wasn’t performative. It was [about] the joy of being in a body.” Majoring in kinesiology, she considered studying physical therapy after graduation. But her goal ever since she watched the movie Center Stage at 11 years old was to move to New York and become a dancer.
Jones moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the financial district with three roommates. In between dance auditions, she worked on her yoga practice, attending classes at Yoga Vida, where Hilaria Baldwin was her teacher. “It was hot-girl yoga.” She began training to be a yoga instructor. “I got hired right away, because I was good enough and cute enough.”
“The cool, older dancers were going to yoga.”
A few years later, “I met my mentor, Nevine Michaan, who invented a style of yoga called Katonah Yoga. It was radical stuff,” she explains. “It wasn’t like the pop-culture yoga that I was teaching at the vinyasa studio.” Nike secretly sent a scout to one of her classes to test her as a trainer for 45 Grand, their exclusive Manhattan fitness space. Jones was hired, and through 45 Grand she met clients including Singer, Roitfeld, and former Elle editor Danielle Prescod.
When Michaan closed her Chelsea studio, in January 2015, Jones dreamed of starting her own. A boyfriend encouraged her to actually do it. Both he and Michaan gave Jones and her business partner, Chloe Kernaghan, a few thousand dollars to start Sky Ting. After seeing a single space, she signed a lease.
The business expanded rapidly, and Jones opened two new studios, in Tribeca and Williamsburg. “The vision was having a place to do yoga that didn’t feel corporate or overly spiritual,” she says. “I hire my friends and pay them really well. I knew what it was like to be a freelance yoga teacher.”
In 2017, Jones and the boyfriend who had helped her open the studio broke up. She tried to buy him out of the company but couldn’t. “We were at a standstill.”
Then the coronavirus hit, and Jones closed all of the brick-and-mortar locations (only, eventually, opening a new Chinatown location) and expanded Sky Ting’s online platform, which had launched in November 2019. “I had, like, 150 subscribers, then we got 3,000 subscribers overnight in March 2020.”
Now Jones is opening her largest studio ever. Courtney Applebaum—the Row’s interior designer—and architect David Bench helped design the new space. It includes rooms for Sky Ting’s signature yoga class, as well as hot yoga and dance. Plus, there are infrared saunas, a cold plunge, and a treatment room. “We’re starting with Osea facials and then we’ll do acupuncture [and] massage.”
“This is a full relaunch,” says Jones, smiling. “I’m single with no ties. I’m untethered and free.”
Sky Ting’s NoHo studio opens May 1
Clara Molot is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
