Muenda Trading Company started as a little seed of an idea to find a market for beautiful woven baskets made by the resourceful women of South Africa. Today, over a decade later Muenda supports disadvantaged artisans in over a dozen countries, mostly those living in Africa. Muenda means "one who cares for others" in Swahili, which is what we do! Muenda follows fair trade practices and strives in every way to have as little impact on the environment as possible.

Syracuse Cultural Workers have long been an amazing source of Tools for Change, providing a whole range of political and progressive slogans and artwork on a vast array of product types. These folks have built a solid business through their popular mail-order catalogue, and while the majority of the catalog content has been online for sometime, it is only recently that they decided to invest in a capacity to place orders through the web.

As it happened, we were given the opportunity to take on this project shortly after noticing the rise of Ubercart, and were eager to jump in and give it a shot. The requirements of the site were relatively straightforward, and it seemed that Ubercart, even in it's "alpha" state, could do the job.

Several months later, we are happy to say that the site has launched successfully, and the SCW staff are processing a steady flow of orders coming in through the site. Below are some details on how we implemented things, and in particular what pieces of Ubercart we had to hack/mold to our needs.