The New England Direct Marketing Association (NEDMA) presented the 2011 Prodigy Award to Alexandra Proelss MS '11 at the NEDMA annual conference held at Bentley on May 11.

As a retail marketing manager at Sperry Top-Sider, Proelss has been honored with the 2011 Prodigy Award for her work helping to reposition Sperry Top-Sider from a classic male brand to a fashion icon. Through multiple Corporate Immersion courses at Bentley, she worked on direct marketing projects that enabled her to use qualitative and quantitative primary and secondary research to create targeted direct marketing campaigns to launch 14 new Sperry Top-Sider retail and outlet stores from Maine to California with record breaking opening sales.

Most recently she headed a company-wide research initiative to understand the current and future potential of in-store smartphone usage and the similarities and differences between consumer needs online versus offline.