Casey Reid
Owner & CEO
Illinois
About Clearfire
We build digital platforms for organizations built around people.
Clearfire is a design, development, and strategy partner for membership organizations, professional communities, and platforms built around engaged users.
For more than 20 years, we've helped organizations create better digital experiences for the people they serve.
We work closely with marketing and internal teams as an extension of their organization - helping solve problems, simplifying complexity, and building platforms that are easier to use, manage, and grow.
Meet the Team
The people behind the platforms.
We're a small team of designers, developers, and strategists who work close enough to understand the people, systems, and decisions behind every platform.
Andrea Hester
Director of Operations
Illinois
Frank Kepler
Director of Development
Washington
Catherine Kleimeier
Web Developer
Michigan
Joel Domingues
Web Developer
Portugal
André Pimpão
Web Developer
Portugal
Andy Johnson
UX Designer
Ohio
Agustina Kramer
Project Manager
Argentina
How We Work
How it actually plays out.
Principles are easy to write and hard to hold. Here's what each one means in the working day - what we do, and what we deliberately don't.
01 · Strategy First
Strategy before screens.
The best solutions come from understanding the problem before trying to design around it.
- Audit existing platforms before proposing new ones
- Map the actual journeys, not what is assumed to be right
- Surface problems before trying to provide solutions
- Open Figma on day one
- Assume the brief is the problem
02 · Human Connections
Built around partnership.
An embedded extension of your team - not a vendor managing a ticket queue.
- Direct lines of communication to the people doing the work
- Senior thinking on every call
- Continuity that spans years, not just small phases
- Account managers as a filter
- Strategy decks handed off to juniors
03 · Right Tool For The Job
Technology-agnostic.
The goal is solving the problem in the most sustainable way - not defending a favorite stack.
- Craft, Laravel, custom apps when they fit
- No-code or low-code where it earns its place
- AI woven through workflow, not bolted on the side
- "Use this platform because it's ours"
- Rebuilding what already works
Experience That Brings Perspective
Two decades of watching platforms grow, drift, and recover.
Often, our biggest value comes from bringing outside perspective that internal teams simply haven't had the time or exposure to develop themselves. After twenty years, the patterns repeat.
What actually creates long-term engagement, not just what looks like it could.
Which platform decisions create problems two and three years down the road.
Where organizations tend to overcomplicate things that didn't need to be complicated.
How systems should connect and communicate, and where to draw the lines.
What patterns repeat reliably across industries, audiences, and platform types.
AI As Part Of The Process
Threaded through the work - not bolted on the side.
AI shows up at every stage of how we work, in places where it actually compresses time or sharpens judgment. We don't use AI just for the sake of using AI. We use it to ship better work, more efficiently.
In Strategy
Analysis at scale
Clustering interview quotes, auditing findings, and surveying data into the themes worth acting on.
In Design
Faster exploration
Rapid copy and layout variants so design conversations happen over options, not blank canvases.
In Development
Higher-quality builds
Code generation, test scaffolding, and review tooling that lets a small team ship at the velocity of a larger one.
In Integration
Smarter routing
Triage, classification, and the long tail of small data decisions that used to require a human in the loop.
In Ongoing Care
Earlier signal
Monitoring patterns and errors that surface issues before members are the ones reporting them.
For Members
Better discovery
Personalized search, recommendations, and content surfacing across resources, archives, and directories.
Who We Help
Organizations that people join, return to, and rely on.
Membership
Membership organizations
We help associations and member-based organizations create better digital experiences for joining, logging in, accessing resources, registering for events, and staying engaged over time. Often balancing growing member expectations with limited internal technical resources.
Learn More →Community
Community platforms
Organizations built around participation, collaboration, learning, and shared interests - professional communities, creative networks, educational communities, industry groups. The platform is often where the community actually happens.
Learn More →Accounts
User-account platforms
Organizations that depend heavily on logged-in experiences - dashboards, profiles, onboarding flows, resource access, marketplaces, or personalized content. We understand the technical complexity behind platforms where the user experience continues long after the homepage.
Learn More →Partnerships
Marketing Teams
Many client relationships start with a marketing team that has strong internal leadership but limited bandwidth for UX, platform strategy, development, integrations, or ongoing optimization. We help move initiatives forward without adding unnecessary complexity.
Learn More →Organizations that trust Clearfire
