Dogged Determination Wins the Girl

Jesse Jardim puts a lot of faith in his dogs. He and his team at Superior Bed Bug Solutions (SBBS) in Alexandria, Va., have six in all, rescued from a shelter and trained alongside police, arson and bomb-squad dogs by the Forensic and Scientific Investigation Institute to sniff out bed bugs with the best of them. The SBBS canine detection team hasn’t let Jardim down yet.

In fact, two of the pooches — namely Sunny Sleuth and Sherlock Bones — have played another pivotal role in Jardim’s life: wingman. When Jardim met Elizabeth O’Connell, a yoga teacher and campaigns director for the consumer advocacy group Green America in 2012, he sensed that she might need a little coaxing to get involved with a man whose profession centers around the region’s most detested infester. And he most definitely wanted to become involved. So, he brought Sunny and Sherlock along on their first date — a French-themed picnic he had planned on the banks of the Potomac.

“I loved them immediately,” says O’Connell about the dogs, who opened a new door to the couples’ future. Jardim and O’Connell tied the knot this summer, in a story so picture-perfect it was covered by The New York Times.

“The story definitely got attention among friends and acquaintances — it was also re-posted on the news-and-arts blog Gothamist — but I don’t think it brought us any new business,” Jardim reports. Not that SBBS necessarily needs new business at the moment: The company has been growing since Jardim established it in 2010, in response to the tremendous demand for bed bug remediation in the D.C. area. Then a middle-school Spanish teacher, he got the idea to start the business when his roommate, a mover who flipped used furniture on the side, inadvertently brought bed bugs into their house. “I did a lot of research to figure out how to get rid of that infestation,” he says. “In the process, I recognized and seized the opportunity to bring outstanding canine detection and heat remediation services to the area. We haven’t seen a slow day since.”