Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 - (Page 18)

Alita Nemroff Friedman ’87 has built a successful business around one of the hottest toys on the planet. But it hasn’t been pretty. In fact, it’s been Pretty Ugly. Friedman is director of sales and marketing and a principal of Pretty Ugly, LLC, which manufactures and sells the Uglydoll®, an award-winning brand that now includes more than 20 styles of plush stuffed characters, a stationery line, a card game, and T-shirts. A series of Uglydoll books from Random House will debut in April, and Friedman hopes Uglydoll will become an animated TV series or movie one day. In almost fairy-tale fashion, the Uglydoll phenomenon started as a love story. David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim, two artists who met in school in New York City, shared a dream of making toys. They fell in love, but when Kim’s student visa expired in 2001, she had to return to Korea. Horvath would sign the love letters he sent her with a drawing of a cute little character they had created together called Wage. Kim, in turn, sewed a stuffed doll of the character and sent it to Horvath. (Like all fairy tales, this one has a happy ending: Horvath and Kim married, and now make toys together.) In 2003, a close friend of Friedman’s, Drew Matilsky, launched the brand and soon enlisted Friedman to handle the marketing and sales of the product. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, all Friedman needed to see was her children’s reaction to the dolls. “From the ﬁrst day in 2003 when I brought them home to my kids—who were 8 and 5 years old at the time—they got it,” says Friedman, who lives with her husband, Glen Friedman ’86, and two children, Stephen and Alec, in New Jersey. “They read the tags and they couldn’t stop laughing. They wouldn’t put the dolls down all weekend. At that moment, I knew I had something unique and special in my hands.” In addition to her 20 years of experience in accounting and marketing, Friedman credits her Lehigh education—she graduated with a degree in accounting and a minor in sociology—with preparing her to succeed in the business world. “The whole accounting faculty challenged you to be the best you could be and taught you how to be accountable to yourself,” Friedman says. “Lehigh taught me how to live and function in the real world. The skills I learned at Lehigh are the skills I use in my everyday life.” Her sociology minor allowed her to explore other academic courses outside of the business school. “All the various activities through organizations and course work expanded my horizon,” Friedman says. Her education and experience led Friedman to come up with a creative plan to turn Uglydoll into a top specialty brand that is licensed and sold worldwide. Her initial strategy involved walking around New York City and targeting high-quality shops in every neighborhood. She read endless pop culture, design, fashion, and home décor magazines and pitched her product to retailers featured in them. ™, ® and ©2008 Pretty Ugly LLC/Sun-Min Kim + David Horvath. All rights reserved. 18 lehigh alumni bulletin

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Ugly is in the Eye of the Beholder Fitch's Law of Motion A Blessing to the Community The Amidonian Acclamation China Trip Bridges Cultures, Generations From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News The Last Word

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.