From trading burnout to a celebrity beauty salon in Prague

At 24, Ukrainian Angelina Vitga was negotiating million-dollar deals in Warsaw and running a sales department of eleven people — and burned out completely. Today she owns the successful permanent makeup salon K2Beauty in Prague, whose clients include models and media personalities, and she is also a co-owner of the coffee shop The Miners.

Working in international trading left her without a moment’s peace: two phones, correspondence with clients from the US and Arab countries from early morning, fifteen-minute lunches between deals. Vitga was one of the few women on a male-dominated team where colleagues were twice her age. “I had to quickly learn to stand my ground and not let either my age or being the only woman in the room hold me back,” she recalls. A few years later, burnout set in — in her words, less because of the field itself and more because she didn’t know how to separate her own responsibility from her employer’s.

She took a six-month break, quit her job and went traveling to think through her next steps. She didn’t go back to the corporate world — she decided to start her own business instead. She initially planned to open a brow bar, but after talking to a doctor friend from an aesthetic medicine clinic, she switched to permanent makeup, seeing greater potential in that niche for a sustainable business.

Her entrepreneurial journey began in 2019 with a rented beauty room, and a year later Angelina and her mother opened a full-fledged studio, K2Beauty, in Prague’s Karlín district — right at the start of the pandemic. The turning point came in 2021, when influencer Matka Veronika, with 60,000 followers, mentioned the salon in her Instagram stories. The number of inquiries multiplied, and word of mouth brought in clients such as models Andrea Bezděková and Aneta Vignerová, as well as Tatiana Makarenko, founder of the Miss Czech Republic pageant.

The salon expanded its range of services — manicures, pedicures, brow and lash lamination, cosmetology — the team grew to fifteen people, and a second branch opened in Brumlovka. But the bigger the business got, the more Vitga felt a growing distance from her clients. In the end, she decided to sell the more profitable Karlín location, keeping the smaller, more intimate Brumlovka branch, which better reflects her vision for the brand.

She pooled the proceeds with funds from her husband and an architect friend and invested in a franchise of the coffee brand The Miners, opening a location in Florentinum — rather than building her own concept from scratch.