Harvard alumnus pairs jewellery venture with social mission for poor

She appeared as a panellist last week at an event in Bangkok where 200 young Thais attended a presentation on the admissions process for the school’s Master of Business Administration programme. 
Proud told the audience that compared with ordinary Thais, she was lucky to have been educated abroad at very young age. She was just 13 years old when she went to study in England. 
Proud completed her MBA at HBS in 2015. After that, she got a high-paying job at a private equity firm that invested in consumer brands, and one of them was in jewellery. There she learned how she could create her own jewellery business.
She said she realised that many jewellery brands were produced in Thailand but no one really put much value on the fact that these were Thai crafts being sent out to the world and appreciated around the world. 
Proud values highly the jewellery products crafted by today’s Thai artisans and their ancestors whose skills and talents have been passing down to the current generation. 
She launched her online jewellery business, Cerimani, in New York a few weeks ago. After deciding to go into business for herself, she vowed to work with communities to support poor villagers in Mae Hong Son province, where the standard of living is the lowest in Thailand. 
For her, business is not a tool for making profit but for making social change.
“I simply want to give back |to the community that has been |producing these crafts for generations,” Proud said. Her product designs are an elegant fusion of the ancient silversmithing traditions of the Kingdom of Lanna and the high fashion of New York. 
She pledges to donate part of her revenue for social programmes via the Karen Hill Tribes Trust, an international charity. 
Judging from the way she promotes her jewellery collections on her website www.cerimani.com, she has taken advantage of the emergence of conscious consumerism, as lot of consumers are concerned about climate change, income inequality, human-rights abuses and political violence. 
She makes sure her jewellery collections are made from conflict-free gemstones.
Asked whether she wants to be the richest woman in Thailand, Proud said that if she wanted to have a lot of money she would have kept her job at the private equity firm. She said she had a passion to make a difference for the society where she lives. 
“I have a lot of Western ideologies that might make me seem to be headstrong in terms of Thai society but it has enabled me to work very well in business and the private sector.” 
She said she was lucky to have a chance to bridge the gap bet-|ween West and East and would continue to do so by working to eliminate poverty in Thailand where lot of people cannot access clean drinking water. 
According to the company’s website, every US$50 (Bt1,700) spent on Cerimani jewellery provides one person with clean water for one year.