Employee Spotlight: Andrea Acosta, Cabinet Order Processor
This month we want to recognize Andrea Acosta, our Cabinet Order Processor.
Andrea is the “woman” behind the magic of Allied Designers, ensuring that all cabinetry orders are fulfilled and completed. Her dedication and attention to detail make her an invaluable resource for the Allied team! Cabinetry orders are common with just about every project that is completed at Allied and her contribution adds to Allied’s fantastic track record of customer satisfaction!
Andrea does order processing for kitchen and bathroom cabinets (kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, tv units, home offices, basically any room of the home that has cabinets) as the middle person between the designer and cabinet factories, she makes sure the cabinets fit in the space the designer has drawn, make sure that what they want to do is possible, that there is proper clearance for appliances, review order confirmations and suggest changes to the orders if needed. She also ensures the orders come in on time and let the warehouse and production departments know what orders are coming in and when, and orders parts for the jobs and samples for clients and the showroom.
In addition to her amazing work, Andrea has a few talents her co-workers may not know about her…
She is a classical pianist! Andrea graduated in 2016 with a Bachelor in Music from New World School of the Arts in Downtown Miami.
Andrea played for about 9 years at a weddings, events, many student recitals and performed almost monthly at the Steinway & Sons Piano Gallery in Coral Gables. As a junior in college, she had to do a half an hour recital where she played some Brahms and Mozart; and as a senior, she performed a full 1 hour recital, playing pieces by Grieg, Satie, Prokofiev, Debussy and Kabalevsky. Every single performance was played by memory (pianists are not allowed to sight-read music on stage).
How did Andrea get to Allied from piano performance? When she was still studying at New World, she was working in a friend’s office and got an offer as office assistant at a very large German kitchen company (Alno) and had a feeling she should take it, and after two years with the company, she saw the potential in the kitchen business and realized music is not what she wanted to ultimately do.
While still in school taking 8 classes, practicing piano 2+ hours a day plus homework and projects, working 30 hours at Alno AND still doing some work on the weekend, she enrolled in AutoCAD classes at night. She graduated with her bachelors and was promoted me to designer trainee in the retail and projects (multi-unit apartment buildings) department as technical designer; drafting plans, doing quotes and some order processing. She then moved on from Alno and accepted her job at Allied Kitchen & Bath where she has worked for over two years.
The second fun fact about Andrea is that she used to have a short radio show when she was about 13 years old in her native Venezuela.
“Back when the Chavez regime started changing the media, the president said radio stations must have children participate in the shows, my dad being the director of one of the largest radio stations in the country, had my sister and I have our own show. It was kind of boring, actually, we talked about typical Venezuelan music and songwriters, but every week our teachers in school would come up to us and say “I heard you on the radio on Sunday” with a big smile on their faces. That part was pretty cool. I also participated in a few commercials throughout my childhood, including one for E! Entertainment Television Latin America and also worked as an extra for a couple of commercials and TV shows in Miami that aired in Latin America. Fun stuff!” – Andrea Acosta
