Fuego UX: Inside the Boulder Agency Running Research, Design, and Engineering Under One Roof
Most boutique agencies pick a lane — research, design, or engineering. Fuego UX, based on 14th Street in Boulder, runs all three, plus strategy, branding, and an embedded-talent bench that plugs senior designers straight into client teams.
Walk down Pearl Street, cut over to 1919 14th St, and you'll find the offices of Fuego UX — a Boulder-based research-and-design agency whose client list reads like a cross-section of modern product work: Yahoo, Fivetran, PowerSchool, Ibotta, PODS, CirrusMD, The Points Guy. Not a directory of logos bolted onto a homepage — actual engagements where Fuego's team has redesigned core flows, rebuilt design systems, or embedded into product pods.
What's unusual about them isn't the client roster. It's how much of the product-building stack they cover under a single engagement.
The unusual thing: full-stack product design
Most boutique shops specialize. Research firms run studies and hand off a deck. Design agencies ship Figma files. Engineering shops wait for specs. Fuego runs seven connected service lines and treats them as one continuous workflow:
| Service | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| UX Design | B2B/B2C software, UI + interaction systems, prototyping, design systems |
| Product Strategy | Vision and roadmap workshops, journey mapping, competitive analysis |
| User Research | Qualitative and quantitative studies, stakeholder interviews, usability |
| Branding | Identity, web, motion, 3D and immersive |
| AI | "Beyond the hype" — AI-powered continuous research, generative prototyping, conversational UI |
| Embedded Talent | Senior UX researchers and designers integrated into client product pods |
| Front-End Development | Senior engineers who ship the designs the same team created |
The point isn't "we offer a lot." The point is the handoff cost is zero. The designer who ran the usability test is in the same Slack as the engineer shipping the fix. On CaliberMind's B2B marketing-analytics platform, that end-to-end model produced what Fuego describes in their case study as "a friction-free experience that transformed [it] into a high-performing growth engine."
The founders
Nate Wearin, co-founder and Head of Research & Design, studied design and human-computer interaction at Iowa State. Fourteen years in UX — consultancies, startups, product companies — including stints working with Carnival Corp and T-Mobile. On the craft side of the business.
Alex Smith, co-founder and Head of Partnerships, came out of Google's analytics and marketing BD org before earning an entrepreneurship MBA at Babson. He hosts Design Leader Insights, Fuego's podcast, which has lately pulled in guests from Meta, Reddit, Figma, and a rotation of AI-native startups.
The pairing matters: research-leader plus growth-leader is the combination that turns a design shop into a studio with real commercial traction — and it shows in how Fuego talks about UX not as aesthetics but as ROI infrastructure.
The work
A few that jumped out from their portfolio:
- Love My Air (Denver) — A civic platform for Denver's air-quality monitoring network. A Boulder shop doing public-good design for the city next door — that's a nice flex.
- CaliberMind — IA overhaul and a Material UI–based design system for a B2B marketing analytics product.
- Sunday — Payment and checkout rebuild for the lawn-care DTC brand.
- Beeline — A year-long vendor management system redesign, enterprise scale.
- EVCS — EV charging app with subscription flow built in.
- DocQ — Workflow redesign that, per Fuego, "led to a significant reduction in customer support requests."
- Yahoo — Research across internal tools and consumer products.
How they use AI
Every agency has an AI page now. Fuego's is shorter and more pointed than most:
"Move beyond 'AI hype' to create functional, AI-augmented experiences."
In practice that means real service lines — AI-powered continuous research, generative prototyping, conversational UI work — rather than a chatbot demo. Design Leader Insights episodes with guests like Adam Karnas on agentic AI design and UX Pilot's Adam Fard on AI reshaping design workflows suggest a team that's thinking about the craft implications, not just the buzzword.
More than an agency — a community hub
Fuego isn't just doing the work. They're showing up for the local scene in a way most agencies don't bother with.
Co-founder Alex Smith runs Denver UX — a ~5,400-member meetup that's been going for about a decade, one of the longest-running and most active UX groups on the Front Range. It's the kind of sustained community investment that turns a city from "has some designers" into "has a design scene," and it happens consistently enough that a lot of local designers credit it with getting them their first job, first mentor, or first talk.
Alongside the meetup, Alex hosts Design Leader Insights, a podcast that regularly pulls guests from Meta, Reddit, Figma, Google, and a rotating cast of AI-native startups. The lineup reads like a short list of people shaping how product design gets practiced in 2026 — and the fact that those conversations are coming out of Boulder, not SF, says something about where Fuego sits in the broader industry.
Most agencies treat thought leadership as marketing. Fuego treats it as community work.
Company snapshot
- Location: 1919 14th St #700, Boulder, CO 80302
- Founded by: Nate Wearin (Head of Research & Design), Alex Smith (Head of Partnerships)
- Team size: ~10 named designers, technologists, and researchers on the About page
- Reviews: Clutch profile — ~20 verified reviews
- Podcast: Design Leader Insights (YouTube and podcast platforms)
- Notable clients: Yahoo, Fivetran, PowerSchool, Ibotta, PODS, CirrusMD, The Points Guy, CaliberMind, Sunday, Beeline, EVCS, Wineshipping
FAQ
Who is Fuego UX?
A UX research and product design agency based in Boulder, Colorado, offering strategy, research, design, branding, AI-augmented work, embedded talent, and front-end development.
Where is Fuego UX located?
1919 14th St #700, Boulder, CO 80302 — with a team distributed across the US.
What industries does Fuego UX specialize in?
B2B SaaS and complex software products, plus consumer apps across insurance, e-commerce, energy, healthcare, education, recruitment, analytics, and transportation.
What makes Fuego UX different from other Boulder UX agencies?
The full-stack model: research, strategy, design, embedded talent, and front-end engineering under one roof, rather than a single specialized service line.
Nominate the next spotlight
This is the first post in the UXDenver Local Spotlight series — editorial profiles of the people, studios, and teams shaping the Front Range UX community.
Follow Fuego UX: fuegoux.com · LinkedIn · Design Leader Insights podcast