How burnout led Yana Geinitsova to build Prague furniture brand Culto

Former marketing director of logistics startup DoDo Yana Geinitsova went through severe burnout, left the business — and unexpectedly became co-founder of Culto, a brand of modular concrete furniture often compared to Lego, already used to furnish offices and now moving into residential interiors through architects.

The idea was born almost by accident: while renovating her flat, Geinitsova bought a bucket of ready-mixed concrete at a hardware store and, together with her daughter, moulded a few planters for the home. The manual work unexpectedly brought her calm after months of insomnia and nervous exhaustion — and the hobby grew into a business idea.

Together with industrial designer and concrete craftsman Michal Brach, she developed a system built from just three basic components: a lightweight concrete block, a hidden internal connector, and shelves made of powder-coated aluminium or wood. The structure is built on a five-centimetre grid, which makes it possible to assemble almost any piece of furniture — from a bedside table to a desk to entire shelving walls.

The key feature of the design is a patented mechanical joint that allows the modules to be assembled and disassembled repeatedly without tools or glue. This solves a problem relevant to the entire furniture industry: ordinary chipboard furniture, held together by layers of glue, is practically impossible to recycle and ends up in landfill with every office move or renovation.

Before launching Culto, Geinitsova was one of the key people on the DoDo team — she was there from the brand’s earliest days and watched it grow and expand into five European markets. However, the intense pace of work, combined with family difficulties, led her to severe burnout and months of insomnia. The turning point came on the day a colleague remarked in surprise: “Oh, Yana’s talking. After two days!” — that was when she realised she needed to radically rethink her life.

Today the same energy and experience she once poured into building a well-known startup are working for her own project — a company offering not disposable furniture, but a “construction set for life,” as the entrepreneur herself puts it.