Dartmouth’s Ring Rescue, which now sells its system for removing stuck jewelry in eight countries, has inked a distribution deal with fire and emergency supplies distributor Team Equipment to make its product available to more than 200 sellers in the United States.

Team Equipment distributes emergency gear to the companies that supply fire departments and other emergency responders, who will now have the option to order Ring Rescue’s technology. The device has already received regulatory approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and has been available south of the border for a year and a half, but COO Blake Smith said in an interview that the Team Equipment partnership will allow Ring Rescue to scale faster.

Smith, who joined Ring Rescue in February 2020, said the company was originally focused on selling its technology to emergency rooms, but decided to expand its target market to include fire departments because they also encounter stuck jewelry on a regular basis and are sometimes even called into emergency departments to remove stuck rings because hospitals lack the equipment.

“When Ring Rescue initially came to be, there was a focus on the ER sector of a hospital, because a lot of emergency departments are removing rings consistently,” he said. “But early on... there wasn’t an understanding of what other verticals or specialties are actually removing rings a lot, so we went out to do a lot research on other verticals.”

Founded by Dalhousie-trained engineer Patrick Hennessey and Dartmouth General emergency room physician Dr. Kevin Spencer, Ring Rescue’s technology uses air pressure to shrink the swelling in a patient’s finger, allowing stuck rings to slide off with the aid of a water-soluble lubricant. The system offers an alternative to doctors’ usual strategy of cutting off stuck rings, which can destroy valuable or emotionally significant jewelry.

Smith is a former brand manager for Saint John-based Kent Building Supplies and marketing manager for Halifax dental technology startup Bluelight Analytics.

Before the Team Equipment deal, 12 companies were selling ring rescue devices in the United States, mostly those that supply hospitals, along with a handful of fire department suppliers.

“Now we’re able to be exposed to this vast network that is going to accelerate our company’s growth, most certainly, and most importantly, impact the fire space and community members by saving their sentimental property,” said Smith.

“We are and have been prospecting, state by state, several different fire distributors that we could partner with... And then we had Team Equipment, who came on board and said, ‘Hey, we're going to help you from end to end, here, and expose you to all of our dealers that purchase from us today.’”

Other nations where Ring Rescue sells its technology include Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Korea and Japan.

The company so-far has 11 employees, including a handful of recent hires, and is in the process of recruiting several more finance and sales specialists for a planned head-count of 14 or 15 people by the end of 2022.

Ring Rescue plans to take what Smith describes as a “blended approach” to its new hires, with some people working remotely and others based out of the company’s office in Woodside Industrial Park.

“We do have some folks that are remote. In fact, we have a sales executive who is based out of Ottawa, we have a Marketing Associate who's based in Toronto, but then everybody else would be local, would be in Halifax. . . . But, you know, we look to make sure we have the right people in the right seats, and we won't use, you know, our region as a barrier to get those people.”

Smith and his colleagues are also in the process of raising a seed round that he says will likely be in the “million-dollar range,” which he expects to close early in the new year.