Building Benefiscent During a Pandemic
The following is an excerpt of a local news article from Patch.com entitled College Senior Tries To Build Business During Pandemic
written by Lanning Taliaferro in May 2020
Cancer patients are among the most vulnerable, so despite losing spring semester the Harrison resident will persevere. HARRISON, NY — The new coronavirus pandemic turned Harrison resident Taylor Graustein's personal and professional worlds upside down.
Her business started as a teenager's project. In 2015, when she was a junior at Harrison High School, she began raising money for cancer research in memory of her mother, who had died of brain cancer. She started making candles by hand in her kitchen and selling them at high school events and other local events around Westchester.
By her senior year at Wake Forest, she began work on launching "Candles for a Cure" as a real company and was accepted into the Startup Lab at the university's Center for Entrepreneurship.
But her last semester was cut short, including the center's planned networking events and activities.
"It certainly feels like a heartbreaking end to my college years," she told Patch.
She got a lot out of the year, including a new name and website for the business: Benifiscent. Twenty percent of every purchase is donated to cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where her mom was a patient.
Read the full article here.
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