Welcome to Ringly
“Jewelry Meet Technology” is the tagline for New York based startup Ringly. Sharing the company name, their first product is Ringly, a ring made with precious or semi precious stones and precious metals, that also contains electronic components that buzz, light up, sense motion and connect with your phone.
I had the privilege this summer t o work for the company that ran their crowdfunding campaign, and therefore heard about this particular piece of tech pretty early on. I was also one of the first 1000 preorders.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″ animation=”none” column_padding=”padding-4-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″][vc_column_text]
The Idea
The initial idea behind Ringly was that women often keep their phones in purses or other bags, due to the continuing growth of phones and shrinkage of pockets. However, this means they often miss calls or important notifications, especially if their phone is on vibrate. However, most of the smart tech on the market is pretty geeky, and there is certainly a large portion of women (and men for that matter) who aren’t into that look.
Enter Ringly, a smart ring, which can connect to your phone via bluetooth and provide subtle notifications by vibrating and flashing different colours of light. The colour and number of vibrations indicate what type of notification and who it’s from, based on your settings in the native phone app.
However, a second use case of Ringly becaome apparent fairly quickly, and it is a somewhat paradoxical one. Although Ringly is a connected device it can actually help you tune out. With the security that you’ll receive important notifications you can tune out the rest of them, and stop checking your phone all the time. The Ringly app further helps facilitate this with an option called Inner Circle, which basically blocks all incoming notifications except for those on your approved contact list.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″]
Packaging Design
The packaging of Ringly is elegant and stylish, echoing the brand values. Use of several black on black printing is used, including applying letters in a gloss finish on matte paper and indenting the letters. Even the accompanying letter was written on heavy stock, and contained gold highlights. Ringly is marketed according to a certain type of lifestyle and image, and the packaging and branding is very reflective of that.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″ animation=”none” column_padding=”padding-4-percent” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″][vc_column_text]
Charging Solution
Perhaps the most brilliant part of Ringly’s design is nothing to do with the tiny electronics or allure of gold and jewels. Rather, the ingenious solution to the most common problem wearables encounter: how do you charge it? To charge Ringly you simply put it in the ring box you received it in. The box can be plugged in with a micro USB, but in my experience the box also holds some charge itself. Since rings (at least chunky ones) have to be put somewhere at night anyways, this solution makes a day long battery sufficient (though my battery tends to last a bit longer than that: 1.5-2.5 days). The ring’s light pulses red to indicate charging.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/4″]
