West End Interiors
West End Interiors is a luxury interior design-build firm in Buffalo, NY. I joined when the business was still essentially a startup, as its second employee, and was promoted from Design Assistant to Studio Manager & Procurement Lead within seven months. I helped scale the back office into a seven-person operation spanning design, accounting, warehouse, and retail.
I managed full-cycle procurement across 150+ vendors for approximately 50 completed projects, including historic homes by architects such as E.B. Greene, a 10,000-square-foot brownstone renovation, and select commercial and hospitality work such as Wayland Brewing Co., with individual procurement orders routinely exceeding $100K for single fixture categories. I led material specification across plumbing, hardware, lighting, window treatments, furnishings, and finishes, wrote the FF&E specifications, and built every order from them, checking each against the shop drawings, furniture plans, finish plans, reflected ceiling plans, and elevations before release. I coordinated workflows across designers, clients, contractors, vendors, and the warehouse team, managed delivery and installation on active job sites, and resolved claims for damages.
I also managed the financial and administrative side: monthly invoicing of billable hours across the full team for approximately 25 concurrent projects at varying stages, project budgets, and financial reconciliation. I ran bookkeeping and warehouse functions until 2023, wrote the studio's standard operating procedures, and hired and onboarded a CPA and a warehouse manager against them. The procedures covered each stage from consultation through final walkthrough.
ROLE
Studio Manager & Procurement Lead
DATES
2020-2024
LINKS
