An oil rig in the middle of Louisiana is hardly the place one pictures as the starting point for a career in fine jewelry, but that’s exactly where Krish Himmatramka found himself pondering how he could make the engagement process easier for couples.
The Houston-born mechanical engineer admits the scenario seems unreal—but his whole experience of coming up with the idea for Do Amore on that drilling site, creating the company with the goal of being a premier ethical jewelry brand, and appearing on TV’s Shark Tank has been wild and wonderful, he says.
“Do Amore means ‘I give with love’ in Latin, and there’s a reason for that name,” Himmatramka says. “I wanted to propose to my wife with a ring that didn’t hurt the world but helped the world. And during that process I realized this should be a company.”
With the tagline “Exquisite rings, extraordinary impact,” Do Amore promises its customers that by purchasing a ring, they can change someone else’s life, too: For every ring it sells, Do Amore makes a donation to Charity: Water, an organization that helps provide clean water to people worldwide.
Himmatramka’s family lived in a variety of places across the globe, because of his father’s jobs in oil and gas. Seeing the water crisis in some of those areas deeply affected a young Himmatramka, and he never forgot his desire to help solve what seemed like a solvable problem.
Upon graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, Himmatramka had multiple job offers, and he decided to work for an oil company in Houston. “My entire life I always thought I’d become a mechanical engineer, work for a while, then get my MBA. I’d stay at the same company and work my way up to be an executive. I never thought about starting my own business,” he says.
Though he chose the Houston job to stay near family, he was soon transferred to Mansfield, La. There, Himmatramka observed how oil wells could strike water within a few minutes, but it took weeks to find oil.
“I couldn’t believe water is that close to where we walk every day, but there are people dying because they can’t get access to it,” he says. “I decided I had to do something about this. I thought about founding a nonprofit to drill water wells, but that would be reinventing the wheel because there were others already doing that.”
When Himmatramka got engaged and was shopping for an engagement ring, he went to all the typical retailers, but few could speak about their ethical standards in a way that Himmatramka found satisfying.
“I definitely overthought our engagement ring,” Himmatramka says with a laugh. “I wanted it to be this positive thing in the world. It was the most expensive thing I had ever bought at that point, so I was overthinking everything.”
He celebrated his engagement by contributing to a water project in Haiti, so that served as the business model when Himmatramka established Do Amore in 2014 (without a formal business plan): His jewelry brand would help clients help others during one of the most exciting times in clients’ lives.
“We work with a charity partner, and we fund the well and its maintenance,” Himmatramka explains. “We give our clients the GPS coordinates and a photo of every water well they helped create.… People come to us every day for our rings because they want their rings to do more.”
Himmatramka says Do Amore has the largest social impact per product sold of any for-profit company he knows of because of its commitment to clean-water projects. He also believes in transparent sourcing on the metals and stones he uses, both lab-created and natural.
“I’m confident we will become a premier company worldwide because we are not only saying what we stand for, we are actually showing and doing it,” Himmatramka says.
Top: Krish Himmatramka founded Do Amore as an ethical wedding jewelry brand that supports clean water initiatives for communities worldwide. (Photos courtesy of Do Amore)
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