Working in a hard world taught me how to hit targets, manage global events, and keep climbing a ladder that looked impressive from the outside. What it didn’t teach me was how to feel good while I did it. The day I realized that “success” no longer matched the life I wanted, I stopped trying to sand down the sharp edges and started building something soft instead. Puppy Love™ grew out of that decision: a business where rescue puppies, stressed-out teams, and genuine joy share the same room, and where softness is treated as a strength rather than a flaw.

Las Vegas, NV (PRUnderground) July 21st, 2026

Puppy Love began as one woman’s answer to a question many professionals quietly ask themselves: what if success didn’t have to feel so hard all the time? That question, and the story behind it, recently earned founder Sabrina Freed a feature in Influential Women for her essay, “Working in a Hard World, Building a Soft Business.”

In the piece, Sabrina reflects on her journey from high-pressure corporate roles to leading a company where rescue puppies and stressed-out teams share the same room, and everyone walks away breathing a little easier. It’s not a typical business trajectory, which is exactly why it caught attention.

From Corporate Climber To Creator Of Soft Spaces

Before Puppy Love existed, Sabrina spent decades at the center of global events and corporate programs. She helped run major trade shows, national sales meetings, and incentive experiences for household-name companies. The stakes were high, the travel constant, and the workload intense.

What often went unseen was the cost. Sabrina built her career without a traditional college degree, which meant expectations were heavy and scrutiny was real. Her response was to outwork everyone around her. Promotions and responsibilities followed, but somewhere along the way, she could feel that the work no longer aligned with the kind of life she wanted to lead.

In her Influential Women piece, she describes reaching a point where she realized the ladder she’d been climbing all those years was leaning against the wrong wall. Instead of ignoring that feeling, she made the rare decision to step sideways, leave her executive role, and admit that the old version of “success” no longer fit, even without a clear map for what came next.

The Moment A “Soft” Idea Became Serious

The turning point wasn’t a carefully scripted strategy session. It started with a throwaway joke. During a planning meeting for a rooftop event, Sabrina suggested a “puppy kissing booth.” People laughed, then started debating logistics, then moved on.

Sabrina didn’t.

As she later shared in Influential Women, the image of professionals relaxing with puppies kept returning. She could picture executives loosening up, teams dropping their guard, and people reconnecting with themselves for a few minutes in the middle of a crowded corporate environment.

Instead of dismissing it as a funny idea, she leaned in. She researched rescue organizations, studied animal-assisted wellness, and began sketching out a business that would bring rescue puppies into workplaces, conferences, and corporate gatherings for carefully designed moments of relief. That seed eventually became Puppy Love, a company built around inviting softness into some of the hardest spaces in modern work.

Building Puppy Love From The Ground Up

The story that Influential Women highlighted is not one of overnight success. Sabrina built Puppy Love step by step. She started with smaller events, refined her safety and sanitation protocols, and learned what it means to be responsible for both animals and people in the same environment.

For a time, she lived in two worlds: corporate projects on one side, and Puppy Love on the other, filling evenings and weekends with puppy events that left people glowing instead of drained. When she saw which work truly energized her, she made the leap and committed fully to Puppy Love.

Today, the company operates in multiple markets and has partnered with hundreds of organizations, from tech giants and law firms to trade shows and commercial real estate portfolios. Every event centers on the same simple idea that anchored Sabrina’s essay: when the world feels hard, bringing even a little softness into the room can change everything.

Resilience When The World Stopped

One of the reasons Sabrina’s story resonated with Influential Women is that it doesn’t skip the hardest chapter. When the pandemic halted in-person events, Puppy Love saw its calendar go empty almost overnight. Offices were closed, conferences canceled, and wellness activations written off by many as a thing of the past.

Instead of walking away, Sabrina chose quiet resilience. She took a part-time caregiving job to stay grounded, then spent her afternoons strengthening her business. She kept communicating with clients, continued her monthly newsletter, and maintained faith that teams would eventually need connection even more than before.

When in-person events returned, demand for Puppy Love didn’t trickle back, it surged. Companies wanted ways to thank their teams, acknowledge what they’d been through, and rebuild connection. Puppy Love stepped into that need with thoughtful puppy experiences that supported both employee well-being and rescue partners, validating the belief at the core of Sabrina’s essay: human connection never goes out of style, even in the hardest seasons.

Leadership That Treats Joy As Real Data

In “Working in a Hard World, Building a Soft Business,” Sabrina writes about how Puppy Love reshaped her view of leadership. Instead of treating leadership as constant control and polish, she began to see it as the act of creating spaces where people can exhale.

That philosophy shows up in the way Puppy Love designs events and runs its own team. Clients are given experiences where employees can step away from their desks, spend a few guilt-free minutes with puppies, and return to their day with lighter shoulders and clearer heads. Internally, Sabrina leads by being honest about uncertainty, maintaining strong standards for animal and human care, and saying no when opportunities clash with those values.

The result is a business that treats joy as more than a nice-to-have. When clients write after an event to say, “I haven’t seen my team smile like that in years,” Sabrina sees that feedback as information. Those smiles reveal something about stress levels, team culture, and the health of the workplace. For her, joy is data, and it deserves to be part of the conversation around performance and leadership.

A Different Kind Of Business Story

Puppy Love doesn’t look like a traditional corporate case study, and that’s part of why Influential Women chose to highlight Sabrina’s story. It shows what can happen when someone openly admits that the existing script no longer fits, and then builds a company around the softer, more human version of success they were looking for.

The heart of her message is simple: the parts of you that felt “too much” or “not enough” in certain rooms may be exactly what your next chapter needs. For Sabrina, that meant turning empathy, persistence, and an unconventional idea into a business that helps people feel better at work while supporting rescue animals behind the scenes.

Puppy Love stands today as proof that softness can coexist with ambition, and that creating space for joy can be a serious business decision, not a side note.

The post Puppy Love™ Founder Spotlight: Working In A Hard World, Building A Soft Business first appeared on

Original Press Release.