From dreams of criminal police to a colourful pilates studio in Prague

Zuzana Hruclová could have ended up working for the criminal police, but instead she opened Merry Shark, a vividly colourful studio in Prague's Pragovka district, where reformer pilates meets a vegan café and a concept store. The project is her attempt to create a space open to absolutely everyone — regardless of age, gender or fitness level.

Hruclová has practised pilates since she was sixteen, but for a long time only at home, without studios or group classes, keeping up the practice even through pregnancy. Professionally, her path began in a completely different field: she graduated from the Police Academy with a degree in security management and seriously considered a career in the criminal police. But even while studying she realised career growth there would be too slow, and gradually moved into styling, set design and production, eventually opening her own creative studio with a friend.

Entrepreneurship wasn't foreign to her — her grandmother ran a village grocery store for more than twenty years, and her grandfather founded Ekofrukt, the company behind the Twigy muesli bars. Hruclová got her first taste of running a business about five years ago, on maternity leave, when together with her sister, eight years her junior, she launched the clothing brand Merry Shark out of leftover fabric scraps. The project never had big ambitions — it was more of a creative venture that, as she admits, “definitely couldn't make money; if anything, you had to keep putting money in that never came back.” It was gradually wound down, but the name Merry Shark stuck.

The idea for the new version of the brand was born in 2024, when after years working in production and the creative industries, Hruclová wanted to build her own physical space — “her own world.” In the summer of 2024 she approached Pragovka for the first time, without yet knowing the exact concept — a concept store focused on fashion and design was one option under consideration. A more concrete direction emerged during a Christmas holiday in Bali, where a friend first took her to reformer pilates — a workout on a special training machine. “It was just a relaxed atmosphere, nobody was looking at what leggings you had on,” she recalls.

After returning home, Hruclová started visiting Prague's studios and thinking about whether reformer pilates could be built into the project she had in mind. In early 2025 she approached Pragovka again — this time with the idea of combining workouts, a concept store and other services, while also enrolling at My Pilates Academy for professional training.

While preparations were underway, the market was changing fast: at the start of 2025 there were only a handful of modern reformer studios in Prague, but within a few months their number grew noticeably. “It worried me a little — it felt like I was opening something that had become a trend in the meantime,” the entrepreneur admits. That's exactly why she made sure Merry Shark wouldn't look like just another typical studio, but would become a space for a genuinely broad audience.