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Detroit Labs Shows Off Cool New Space On Woodward

DETROIT (WWJ) -- The ladies who used to shop at the six-story Lane Bryant store in downtown Detroit wouldn't recognize the place.

The app development shop Detroit Labs has moved in to the fifth and sixth floors of the building at 1520 Woodward. The 45-employee company is yet another tech outfit calling the area between Grand Circus Park and Campus Martius home.

(For a photo gallery of the Detroit Labs space, visit this link.)

Detroit Labs has taken about 12,000 square feet for its new home. The offices have plenty of windows for the daytime and plenty of ceiling height, with exposed brick walls, exposed beams and mechanicals up above, and wooden floors below adding to the cool quotient. Caricatures drawn by the staff vie with big-screen TVs for wall space. And there's a hardware shop where the staff can tinker with tech toys.

There's also an open space in the center of the sixth floor looking down on the fifth floor below -- but not quite like the one that used to be there. Those in charge of the building said that before its restoration, it had gaping holes in the floors caused by its rat-infested deterioration -- it had been vacant for some 30 years.

It's one more reclaimed building along a formerly largely deserted stretch of Woodward that now sparkles with lights from newly renovated loft living spaces and offices.

Dozens of employees, friends, vendors and customers crowded the offices for Thursday night's open house, including Josh Linkner of Detroit Venture Partners, which is backing Detroit Labs.

Co-founder and CEO Paul Glomski -- who started the company in 2011 with Dan Ward, a former tech director at Quicken Loans, and Nathan Hughes -- said the company was formerly based at Quicken Loans and the Madison Building before moving into its new space.

Detroit Labs has some high-profile apps under its belt, including the main ordering app for Domino's Pizza, the DTE Energy outage tracker, Billhighway Give for Billhighway, the Troy nonprofit financial management software developer, MyQL for Quicken Loans, and apps for Biggby Coffee, General Motors and Stryker Corp., the Kalamazoo medical device maker.

Glomski is a Flint native with a dual masters in mechanical engineering and business administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Check out the company at www.detroitlabs.com.

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