College Senior Tries To Build Business During Pandemic

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.

But the impact of the pandemic has taken a toll.

"Even though we are an online store and can more or less operate as usual, our sales plummeted at least 50 percent," she said. "Like any small business, our voice seems to get a little washed out by all of the news."

She is thinking about new ways to reach the community, and she's also trying to give it time.

"Figuring out what to do or say at a time like this is a challenge. It was hard for me to figure out how to advocate for cancer when there seems to be a much more pressing and scary problem," she said. "However, cancer doesn’t go away, or slow down at a time like this. In fact, cancer patients are among some of the most vulnerable people in our community right now, and they still need our attention and support."