Thomas J. Russo spent more than three decades as a president and chief executive in the product industry — fifteen of them as President and Chief Executive Officer of First Alert — before founding T1 Consulting in 2026 to advise companies building physical products and the software inside them.
Under his leadership, First Alert manufactured and marketed the smoke alarms, carbon-monoxide alarms, fire extinguishers, and connected home-safety products that protect tens of millions of American households. The business was sold to Resideo Technologies (NYSE: REZI) for $590 million in February 2022, completing a multi-year transition from Newell Brands' Connected Home & Security division into an independent public-company subsidiary.
A panoramic view of a category
Tom joined First Alert after a senior career at Kidde — Carrier's fire-safety brand and First Alert's principal North American competitor — where he held general-manager responsibilities across marketing and sales. Moving from the general management of one major brand to the presidency of the other gave him a vantage on the residential and commercial product category that few operators in any industry can match.
During his tenure, First Alert held category leadership in residential smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms, combination alarms, and ten-year sealed alarms — a category First Alert defined when it brought the first such product to market — as well as connected, Wi-Fi-enabled alarms through the OneLink platform launched under his leadership. He led the company through Newell Brands' acquisition of Jarden in 2016, the integration into Newell's Connected Home & Security division, the 2018 acquisition of Luma Home that brought mesh Wi-Fi into the OneLink platform, and the eventual divestiture to Resideo that returned the business to standalone operating status.
Built and run at scale
First Alert's North American manufacturing platform — centered in Aurora, Illinois with plants in Juarez, Mexico — operated at scale throughout that period. The result is a leader who has lived the entire arc of a physical-product business: concept and certification, the hardware and the software inside it, manufacturing and sourcing, channel and category strategy, and the mergers, integrations, and divestiture that reshape a company.
Connected products, built from the inside
Long before "connected home" was an established category, Tom put First Alert at the front of it. Under his leadership the company built the OneLink platform — Wi-Fi-connected smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms backed by a companion mobile app, cloud services, and over-the-air software — turning a century-old safety product into a genuine Internet-of-Things device. He drove the integration of Amazon Alexa voice service and Apple AirPlay 2 into the OneLink Safe & Sound, making a life-safety alarm double as a smart speaker, and the 2018 acquisition of Luma Home brought mesh Wi-Fi and a software-defined home network into the portfolio. Few leaders in any hardware category have taken a legacy physical product and rebuilt it as a connected, software-driven platform at that scale.
What he is doing now
Tom founded T1 Consulting LLC to bring that experience to companies developing, manufacturing, and scaling physical products — and the software and connectivity that increasingly ship with them — across new product development, connected-product and IoT strategy, manufacturing, category and channel leadership, and M&A advisory.