Turning Pain into a Purpose-Driven Small Business

Top image: AnaOno Founder and CEO Dana Donofree.

As a young breast cancer patient diagnosed at 27 years old, Dana Donofree found inspiration through her diagnosis and built not just a business, but a support community for the more than four million women living with breast cancer in the United States.

Donofree is the founder and CEO of AnaOno, a lingerie company specifically designed for people recovering from breast cancer surgery and adjusting to their new bodies. Motivated by her own tears in a dressing room, Donofree is helping save others from the same pain. “You’ve been completely traumatized, medically, mentally, and physically, and you just want to feel like yourself. You feel like a patient in every room we step into, you don’t want to feel like that when you’re just trying to open up your drawer and get dressed.”

Donofree’s post-surgery shopping experience existed in a world where mastectomy bras were sold next to wheelchairs and bedpans at hospitals. She grew frustrated that the mainstream industry was overlooking millions of people who simply wanted to shop for bras the same way they did before breast cancer.

The line is sold online and in more than 100 specialty boutiques, and Victoria’s Secret picked up the line in 2024. With features by Vogue, The Today Show, goop, Forbes, and others, AnaOno has tapped into a market born out of necessity that has become a support community helping people connect with others and feel comfortable looking and feeling different.

Despite the dream of owning a business built around her personal passion, Donofree struggles with many challenges that other small business owners across America face. “Anything that attacks our bottom line is under an absolute microscope when it comes to a small business.”

As a member of Intuit’s Small Business Council, Donofree helps advocate for policy changes that improve efficiency and access to capital so small businesses can grow and put more money back into the economy. As a digital business reliant on online transactions, the slow payments, high fees, and unnecessary complexity of an outdated payments system make doing business a challenge.

To make her point, Donofree ran some numbers before a spring 2025 visit to Washington, D.C., and realized she could hire another full-time employee with the amount of fees she pays to banking services. “When you’re a digital business, we’re not just paying the credit card processing fees, we’re paying transaction fees, and then we’re paying the credit card processor processing fees. In the end, you’re paying three to three and a half percent of every transactional value to a bank. I would much rather hire somebody than pay those exorbitant fees or have to pass that along to my customers.”

With her unique customer base, Donofree is fully aware of the financial stress many of them are already facing. AnaOno’s website addresses questions about applying health insurance to purchases and has programs to help people in financial distress:, “We know cancer is not free. It comes as a great expense to the patient.”

“Anything that attacks our bottom line is under an absolute microscope when it comes to a small business.”

Donofree is proud of her company’s work with nonprofits to provide support for these costs. BRCAStrong offers pre-mastectomy kits valued up to $150 that include recovery care products, given to patients at no cost, and Pink Warrior Advocates provides patients in need with a donated bra if they can’t purchase one on their own. Her partnership with Cancer Culture, an organization dedicated to changing the culture of cancer for good through a research-driven approach, helped raise over $150,000 for stage four metastatic breast cancer research at New York Fashion Week in September.

Fifteen years after her diagnosis, Donofree said that she is grateful that, as a young breast cancer patient, she had the opportunity to do something she is incredibly passionate about, even as the challenges continue. “We live in a world where cancer does not discriminate,” Donofree shared. “We have customers who are 18 years old. We have customers who are 78 years old. They are women, they are non-binary, they are men, so it really is an entire population.”