Former brewery gets remake as office for tech firm HookLogic

At the southern reaches of Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor, a brewery-turned-tech-firm transformation will be emerging this spring when e-commerce and digital marketing software provider HookLogic takes over the former Leopold Brothers Brewery building at 523 S. Main St.

The New York-headquartered firm will be consolidating from two other downtown Ann Arbor offices totaling 5,000 square feet. A $9.5 million venture capital infusion from Massachusetts-based Bain Capital Ventures last September is facilitating the firm's move into the 11,000-square-foot building.

Besides the downtown location, other interior features the company found attractive were brick walls and dozens of windows and skylights. After some remodeling, the property should be ready for an April move-in, says Gary Evans, general manager of HookLogic. Renovations include adding shared offices, glassed-in conference rooms, and a break room, though the floor plan will primarily be open.

"We tend to not use a lot of cubes and we don't even use a lot of offices," Evans says. "We like to create open working areas where you can share a lot of information and ideas pretty easily and you can get a lot of energy going in the space, so this is really well suited for that as well."

The firm, which had about 30 employees as of September, is currently hiring and plans to add another 35 positions over the course of the year, according to Evans. He figures the new space can hold up to 100 people.

"Our headquarters is in Manhattan but a lot of our growth is scheduled to be in Ann Arbor, and there's lots of reasons for that. Not least because of access to outstanding talent here," Evans points out, adding, "But we've also got a much bigger space here as well, which really makes it logical for us to build out teams here whenever we can. I think the majority of our growth moving forward is going to be in this office."

Source: Gary Evans, general manager, HookLogic
Writer: Tanya Muzumdar