Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2008 - (Page 20)

She and her team built a comprehensive press kit because she believes that public relations is the best way to advertise a company. The strategy paid off, as Friedman has appeared several times on NBC’s Today show (most recently, to donate $250,000 worth of Uglydolls to the Today Show Toy Drive in December) and the CBS Evening News. The Uglydolls have been featured on CNN’s Newsnight, CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, and in hundreds of major newspapers and magazines, including Time, The New York Times, and Businessweek. And celebrities including Snoop Dogg (LEFT), Nelly, Andy Dick, Ashlee Simpson, and Nicole Richie have helped create “buzz” for the dolls by embracing them. Uglydolls even has its own store within FAO Schwarz, the world-famous toy store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. And the dolls were recently featured for the holidays at Harrods department store in London and were on display in the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. There are a handful of new characters added to the Uglydoll line each year and they’ve become highly collectable, partly due to some limited editions. Asking Friedman to name her favorite Uglydoll is like asking someone to name their favorite child. She loves them all, Friedman demurs. However, she admits that if she’s in a happy mood, she ﬁnds herself particularly drawn to Moxy, the long-eared, mint green female of the bunch. It’s little wonder. If there’s anything Friedman has shown a lot of since her Lehigh days, it’s moxie. The Uglydoll team is a small, tight-knit group that works together closely on a daily basis. Friedman works with the artists to create new strategies and media plans, and also helps them to prepare for interviews and announcements of new products with popular magazines such as People, as well as for various television shows and numerous trade publications. The creators and Friedman work on how they want to position themselves in the media and review each new design to make sure their strategies are aligned. Uglydolls were an instant success once they hit the high-end department stores and museum shops. And the Pretty Ugly team made the conscious decision to keep Uglydolls as a specialty item, instead of making it a mass-market product. “It’s a real grassroots operation,” Friedman says. “We are the next big brand…the next SpongeBob SquarePants or the next Simpsons.” Friedman, who went directly from Lehigh to her ﬁrst assignment on Wall Street, can draw on her experience as a certiﬁed public accountant with former Big Eight accounting ﬁrm Arthur Andersen in New York City, where she audited companies in the service, entertainment, and manufacturing industries. She also spent a decade managing audit and operational consulting practices in New Jersey before moving onto the “mommy track” after she had two children. During this time, she started her own human resources consulting ﬁrm that recruited technologists. She was running the consulting ﬁrm when she was asked to join Uglydoll in 2003. “Lehigh was one of the happiest times of my life,” Friedman says. Two decades after graduating from Lehigh, Friedman maintains her ties to the university. In 2007, she worked on the 20th-year reunion fund-raising committee for the Class of 1987. This is her way to give back to the school, she says. Friedman hired a Lehigh intern over the summer and attended the Lehigh accounting club reception in New York City to meet all the junior accounting majors. She also makes it back to at least one football game a year. Her love for Lehigh is far more than just business, though. Even today, her closest friends are still the ones she made as a 20 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

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