Michelle Freed

The Path

Training in merchandising often shows up later as judgment: where product sits, how it speaks, and what a customer reads before a word is said. At Laboratory Institute of Merchandising and Fairleigh Dickinson University, Michelle Freed built the foundation for work that would move between retail, brand, and message without treating them as separate disciplines. Retail buying and merchandising are both exercises in translation, and that is where Michelle Freed spent the early part of her career: Senior Merchandiser at Enlightened Kids, then Associate Buyer at Toys R Us, then Senior Buyer/Category Manager at Toys R Us. Each role tightened the link between assortment, audience, and commercial intent. The work asks for range — enough instinct to read the shelf, enough discipline to answer to numbers. Brand management and Retail Trade Marketing extend that same logic outward, from the product line to the market position. At Fairy Tales Hair Care, Inc., Michelle Freed served as Senior Brand Manager, then moved into the broader remit of Vice President of Retail Trade Marketing & sales. The progression reflects accumulation in the trade sense: more responsibility, more visibility, more of the message carried at once. Today, Michelle Freed is president; Retail Marketing Specialist Consultant of FreedM Retail Solutions LLC and podcast co-host of Cuban & Sooner Podcast (since 2022). Consulting and podcasting are different formats, but both rely on the same core tool: voice. One shapes how businesses present themselves; the other gives that voice room to move in conversation.

The Work Today

Helping people and organizations find their voice means understanding more than messaging. It means reading tone, audience, timing, and the details that make communication land. Michelle Freed’s work sits at that intersection, drawing on retail, brand management, sales, and consulting to make stories usable in the real world. That line places writing where trade work often lives: in revision, in reintroduction, in the decision to say something more precisely the second time. Michelle Freed’s framing is compact, but it signals a practice built on observation and adjustment. The repetition here mirrors the kind of consistency useful in brand work and in broadcasting alike — a reminder that voice is not static, and that a professional identity can be carried across formats without losing edge.

Signature

Michelle Freed's signature dish is Cuban & Sooner: Work-Life Teetering. The title carries the same slightly off-center humor that runs through her own framing of the human experience, using wit without losing the point. It reads like a phrase built for conversation: light on the surface, but with enough pressure behind it to hold the contradictions of work, identity, and daily balance.

In Their Words “Michelle Freed helps people and organizations find their voice and tell their stories.”