UDig, a Virginia-based digital product company, is expanding into Detroit opening the firm’s fourth market, joining Richmond, Va., Nashville, Tenn., and Atlanta, Ga., and comes as UDig marks 25 years in business.
Scott Brittain joins UDig to lead the market. He has spent 15 years in Detroit consulting, most recently as vice president of client growth at LaunchPad Lab, a Chicago-based product agency. Before that, he joined Slalom’s Detroit office in its earliest years and helped establish its automotive and manufacturing practices as the office grew to several hundred people.
“I came into this market when the economy was falling out from under it, and I have watched these companies rebuild into something genuinely ambitious,” says Brittain. “They are ready to invest in digital products. What they need is a partner who will build with them, not just advise them.”
Nine Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the Detroit region, anchoring deep concentrations of automotive, manufacturing, and logistics. These are industries where a company’s advantage usually lives in something proprietary, whether a plant process, a dealer network, or a supply chain no one else could run.
“There is no shortage of consultants in Detroit,” says Andy Frank, founder and CEO of UDig. “There are very few partners who will sit down and build a digital product with you. The work in this region is genuinely hard. Global manufacturing operations, complex supply chains, decades of systems that have to keep running while you modernize them. That is what we are built for.”
Detroit has rebuilt from the bailout era into a market drawing sustained investment from universities, research institutions, and companies working to keep the next generation of talent in the city.
UDig’s recent work includes a mobile point-of-sale system for a Fortune 500 retailer that reached 40 percent higher employee adoption across 2,300 stores and paid for itself within twelve months, and a home configuration experience for one of the country’s largest homebuilders that produced a 2.5 times increase in qualified buyer leads.
