Integrating with Phreedom and adding custom product fields

i represent a small publishing company that is migrating to Phreedom ERP for their accounting package and planning to use OC as their e-commerce site. We have the two packages integrated using a nice bridge one of Phreedom's authors wrote.

Now i want to develop an OC theme to display a product layout that has 'custom' fields sent over from Phreedom.
The primary product being sold is books, so some of the standard fields don't relate well, eg, Brand should be Author, Product Code s/b Title, etc. What mechanisms does OC have to store custom product data (for example in the 'product' or other table) and for displaying the custom data in a view (customizing the controller/model)?

Thanks!