A city intersection is an unlikely place to put a living room. There are buses to consider, traffic to negotiate and a generous supply of people with opinions. Abigail Kiefer worked on making one at Castro and Market in San Francisco: public space where people could sit, meet and stay awhile. Before her work involved retail software or government dashboards, it involved the fairly radical proposition that a place people passed through could become somewhere they wanted to be.
The furniture matters. So does the arrangement of people who can agree to put it there. That second problem has followed Kiefer through a career that has included urban planning, a design startup, political campaigning and Airbnb. Her job titles change more often than her interest in getting different people to accomplish something together.
A living room at an intersection
Kiefer studied urban and regional studies and environmental planning and policy at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, then earned a master’s in urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. Work in Wisconsin planning preceded her move into San Francisco’s planning department. The city’s housing documents also record her among the planners working on its Housing Element. This was the world of public input, competing needs and recommendations that had to survive contact with actual politics.
Her work at Castro and Market helped turn a piece of the street into shared space. Seen from that angle, her later move into technology looks less like an escape from planning than another way to organize participation. A public plaza makes an invitation visible. Software can do something similar, although it generally offers fewer opportunities to sit in the sun.
The buyers wanted the method
Red Clay, the company Kiefer co-founded with Ashley Etling and Kurt Kober, initially aimed to sell sustainable home decor. Designers contributed ideas, the public voted and the company worked toward manufacturing the selected products in the United States. It was an appealing arrangement right up to the difficult business of making and distributing everything.
At trade shows, another possibility emerged. Retailers were interested in the system that brought the designs together. Red Clay could help them organize their own product development. Kiefer and her colleagues changed the business, moving toward a platform that connected brands with industrial and graphic designers and managed the work between them.
Etling, who came from architecture, remembered their beginnings around good food, drinks and a shared interest in solving problems together. There is something fitting about a collaboration business beginning with people enjoying one another’s company. The software would come with specifications. The partnership had started with dinner.
Kiefer also spent two years in Bentonville, Arkansas, getting to know the retail industry around Walmart. For a former municipal planner entering a different business, that meant putting herself close to the buyers and learning their constraints. A retailer’s calendar can make an elegant idea look rather different.
A crib is a serious design brief
The work becomes easier to understand through a particular assignment. In 2013, children’s retailer giggle partnered with Red Clay on a furniture project covering three nursery staples: a crib, a dresser and changing unit, and a rocker. Designers submitted proposals; the retailer would then seek reactions from its customers.
Kiefer saw two advantages. The retailer could find a designer through an organized community rather than searching the internet and trade shows. It could also learn what customers liked before committing to production. For an object that will occupy a family’s home, that is a sensible time to discover a disagreement.
By 2014, the project had produced a mid-century-inspired nursery collection designed by Ellen Klein. The example made Red Clay’s role concrete. A brand had a brief. Designers brought possibilities. Customers supplied a useful check before the expensive stages began. Someone still had to make decisions, but the people making them could hear from one another earlier.
A way to bring the conversation forward, before production makes revisions expensive.
The unglamorous parts of a good idea
Kiefer’s view of startups had a practical edge. In Arkansas in 2014, discussing the difficulty of finding investment, she described raising money as hard work and pointed toward the kind of funding a customer provides.
“The best capital for a startup is revenue.”
Abigail Kiefer, 2014
Her writing about retail extended well beyond choosing attractive objects. She considered how smaller businesses could use specialist technology services to handle work once available mainly to large organizations. In a 2016 essay, she examined the difficulty established brands faced when systems built for large orders met customers with more particular tastes and different ways of shopping.
The concern was how the pieces fitted together. A company could improve one stage and still leave the next stage awkward. In her writing on retail technology, Kiefer argued for integrations between services, so a product could move through development with fewer disconnected handoffs. Red Clay had itself learned that an effective design process did not automatically solve manufacturing or distribution.
Her May 2016 article, “The Little Guy Is The New Walmart,” considered emerging brands and the technology supporting them. The question had become larger than what her own company could sell. She was interested in who could participate in retail, and what practical machinery would let them compete.
A holiday with a business question attached
In 2018, Kiefer wrote about her first solo international trip, fourteen days in Scotland. Instagram helped her find a place for a cocktail. That led to coffee, a hiking trail, a landmark and a vintage shop. A series of small discoveries became an itinerary shaped around her interests.
She returned to the experience as a question for hospitality businesses: how could they help the right travelers find them? Her argument involved knowing what a property offered, understanding its audience and telling its story through the channels those people actually used. The holiday had acquired a business brief, though presumably the coffee was still enjoyable.
Another essay that year, “The Dirty Dancing Revival,” made the case for updating traditional resorts around experiences and a sense of place. Kiefer’s suggestions included better lighting and linens, reliable Wi-Fi, visiting chefs and dance lessons. She liked the possibilities of an old resort with enough attention paid to the present.
Her public self-description allows for interests beyond work: two marathons, black-diamond skiing and Green Bay Packers loyalty. A 2016 author biography added cheese-making and time with her dog, Bucky. At a housewares event she called herself a total extrovert. This is a person for whom meeting people appears to be part of the attraction, even when the meeting comes with a trade-show badge.
Back on the government side of the table
Kiefer joined Airbnb in 2019. Today, as Director of Policy Products, she works on tools at the meeting point of the company and public authorities. Her planning background gives that meeting a particular resonance: she has worked inside the institutions that technology companies need to understand.
In August 2025, she marked a milestone for City Portal, describing herself as one of its original creators and naming collaborators including Laura Spanjian, Divya Kumaraiah, Kristiane Skolmen, Mara Giorgio, Chris Lehane and Nathan Blecharczyk. More than 1,000 governments were using the tool. She wanted other companies to invest in civic infrastructure and take responsibility for their effects on communities.
Governments using the tool Kiefer helped create.
A shared project, built with colleagues and government partners.Airbnb launched City Portal in 2020 with 18 pilot partners, including governments and tourism organizations. It offered a way to see local information and work with the company on compliance. By September 2021, the partner count exceeded 100. By October 2022, it exceeded 300.
Those partners had specific uses for it. Sacramento used the portal in enforcing its registration requirement. Tourism organizations could examine where guests came from and use that information in their own planning. Housing and tourism remain matters of public choice; a dashboard gives the people involved information and a route for handling the work. Kiefer’s interest in coordination had found another setting.
The campus she keeps coming back to
For all the changes of industry, Kiefer’s relationship with UW-Green Bay has lasted. She attended its daycare while her parents were students, returned as an undergraduate and met Kober through student government. They married in 2007. Years later, they supported the university’s Ignite the Future campaign. She now serves on its Council of Trustees.
“UW-Green Bay is part of my origin story.”
Abigail Kiefer, 2023
Her memories include cross-country skiing to class and listening for friends in the tunnels connecting campus buildings. It is an unusually apt detail for someone whose work keeps involving connections: actual passageways, with familiar voices somewhere ahead.
The plaza, the design marketplace and the government portal belong to different chapters. Each asks people with different purposes to share something useful. In Kiefer’s account of her own life, the university helped shape how she thinks. The career that followed keeps putting that thinking to work: find the people, understand the place and work out how to make room.