BEDFORD COUNTY, Pa (WJAC) — Five Bedford County high school students are turning a classroom idea into their own business, and this weekend, they’re officially launching their first product line.
The friends founded Vivarenza just last month, a locally owned luxury fragrance and clothing brand.
They’ve developed seven fragrances and are preparing to introduce them at Bedford’s Fall Foliage Festival.
Student entrepreneur Harrison Leap said, “We’ve always had an entrepreneurial mind and we just kind of stuck with something. This time we wanted to make it happen.”
Student entrepreneur Elijah Lohr said, “It’s one of the most fun things we’ve ever done, because just running a business in general is a fun thing, but just doing it with your best friends makes it 10 times better.”
The students said creating their fragrances has taken plenty of trial and error, narrowing 20 original ideas down to seven.
Each has a role, from developing products to handling shipping, finances and sales, and the process of making each scent is more complicated than you might think.
Student entrepreneur Gabe Bordi said, “The actual process is also very complicated. It requires counting every individual drop of oil that goes into it, also going down to the milliliter of perfumer’s alcohol that gets added as well.”
Student entrepreneur Preston Pyle said, “Among people that are even coming from further away, they can tell people that didn’t come to Fall Foliage and it’s going to be really beneficial to our business to grow it in the long term, too.”
The students said the Bedford County Chamber’s Young Entrepreneur’s Program has helped them get their business off the ground, and, while fragrances are their first products, they also plan to expand into clothing.