So, Andrea Brown — that’s a fairly common name. Maybe too common. Is it fake?
Yes. I’m in the witness protection program. If anyone asks, I have nooooo idea who killed Tupac.
Don’t worry, no one will see this interview.
Are you related to James Brown? Jackie Brown? What’s your favorite color? What is your favorite Cleveland football team?
I am not, but I think that if James Brown and Jackie Brown were to reproduce…I am what you would get. As for football, I prefer to keep my allegiances private…for my safety and that of my family (but there may or may not be a Terrible Towel hanging in my office come football season).
*Editor’s note: Andrea did not provide an answer to “What’s your favorite color?” thereby indicating to us, and the world, that she in fact, has no favorite color.
When is your birthday and what embarrassing thing about you can we ice on a cake?
February 5, whatever year makes me eternally 29. And why on earth would I tell you that?
So, you share a birthday month with Paul, John and Brad — that makes one less cake we need to get. Thank your parents for us.
No problem.
What brought you to 427 — besides the extravagant pay check, two day work weeks and free kittens (we don’t have any of those things here, by the way)?
Time to get serious…that’s easy. There is crazy talent here. CRAZY talent. And I had to be a part of it.
So you think we’re crazy?
My suspicions have been confirmed.
Now that you’re our new Account Executive, can you tell us exactly what an “account executive” does every day? Because I don’t think anyone here knows.
I have no idea, either, that’s why I changed the title to Client Service + Business Development (Brad said Sr. VP of Awesomeness was a little over the top).
If you were casting “427 Design 2: Lost in New York”, who would play you?
Betty White. Duh.
Were you nervous about occupying an office whose previous occupants have included a web programmer and a Sam Karlo?
No one told me that this was Sam Karlo’s office? That explains all the porn… At least the programmer was smart enough to wipe the system clean.
Do you have any advice for aspiring “account executives” out there, currently coveting your job?
Marry for money. Work for love.
Who is your favorite Golden Girl, and why?
I cannot possibly pick one. Its like asking me which color of M&M tastes better. Each they are all equally awesome!
Did you eat my lunch?
Nope, it was Joe. I saw him do it. And he said he is not afraid of you.
He should be.
According to the musical, Rent, there are numerous ways to measure a year. You can add up the daylights and sunsets (365 of each expected this year, respectively) or even the midnights (the same). You can count the cups of coffee (let’s say, conservatively, two cups a day x 4 habitual coffee drinkers x 52 weeks, minus weekends + an extreme increase halfway through the year when Sam mysteriously discovered coffee = math is hard), or maybe you can’t, really.
You can also count the minutes, but thanks to Jonathon Larson, you don’t have to — in one year there are five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred of them to be exact. Here’s what we did with ours:
We won awards:
In February we won 10 local Addy Awards — 5 gold, 4 silver and the Best Use of Paper and in April, we won 3 additional District Five Addy Awards — 1 gold and 2 silver.
We printed all of the things:
We turned a portion of our photo studio into a silk-screening workshop — officially christened, The Print Lab. We’ve since printed posters, t-shirts and basically anything that will sit still long enough under a screen.
We opened our house:
In April, we celebrated the beginning of our fifth year with our biggest and best open house to date. We had glow-in-the-dark button packs, screen-printed posters and we each built our own robots. Guests dined on moon cheese, astronaut ice cream and posed for a photo booth with custom-made ray guns. Dare we say, the space-themed bash was… out-of-this-world.
We made this site:
In case you didn’t notice, this beautiful (and functional!) site you’re on — it launched in May of this year. We hope you enjoy the weekly blog posts, deep thoughts and portfolio updates, all of which will continue into the new year (and hopefully many years after that).
We made a calendar:
We spent the majority of our summer working with Studio Martone and the good folks at Matco Tools on the 2012 Matco Tools Calendar, a huge project that we’re still (nearly six months later) super excited about. We scouted mulitple locations and ended up shooting at six great ones — DSR Racing in Indiana; Cain BMW in Canton, OH; a replica Mobil Gas Station in Waynesburg, OH; Lucas Oil Raceway in Indiana; MAPS Air Museum in North Canton, OH and a picturesque farm in Magnolia, OH.
Look for the final art to be added soon to our print and video sections.
We bought a building:
Somehow, in the midst of the Matco madness, we managed to buy a building. A 58,000 sq foot, cereal factory from the 1890s at 243 Furnace Street. You can read all about the ongoing project here, here and here.
We hired some people:
Over the course of the year, we’ve had two interns (one of which we hired part-time — lookin’ at you, Manders) and hired Sam Karlo and Jameson Campbell on as full-time employees. And we haven’t regretted at least two of these decisions.
We worked hard for the money:
Justin, Amanda and John manned (and wo-manned) the 427 booth at the SEMA show in Vegas this November. They claim that they worked harder than those of us stuck back here in frigid Ohio, but we remain unsympathetic and unconvinced.
And then, we bowled:
To celebrate all 525,600 minutes of our work this year, we had our Christmas party at Stonehenge Family Fun Center last week, where our talents on the lanes ranged from non-existent (ahem, Joe) to inconsistent (hi, Jameson) to why-are-you-wasting-your-talents-working-for-us amazing (Brad “Bad” Hain and Sam “The Hurricane” Karlo). We only managed to get photos of two out of the three ‘teams’, because the third team had already taken their talents to the Ski Ball machines.
Is there a more fitting tribute to a year of great work, hard work and fun work than purple velour jogging suits, two personalized bowling shirts and a little friendly rivalry? We didn’t think so.