Ujamaa Essentials, LLC

UJAMAA is the Kwanza principle of “cooperative economics”.  It means that a group of like-minded individuals striving for unity and advancement of that group should work together to open and support businesses that enhance the economic environment of the group.

Ujamaa Essentials will operate under this principle as a cooperative of handmade product makers and small service providers.  UE will provide several vehicles for our community to market, sell and ship products as well as interface with one another.

UE’s initial offering will be the online marketplace.  Ujamaa Essentials will host a website by which small product makers can market their wares.  Ujamaa Essentials will function as a full service consignment store.  UE will warehouse, market, sell and ship products for product makers.  Product makers will no longer have to manage an online retail outlet, concern themselves with shipping logistics and will have their products exposed to a broad reach of potential buyers.

Ujamaa Essentials is the collaborative effort of Ayieta Crawford and LaLordi Muhammad.  Each have run successful online businesses and combined have over 15 years of entrepreneurial and product making experience.  Between their two ventures, Shea Essentials (www.SheaEssentials.com) and Shea N’ More (www.SheaNMore.com) they collectively bring together over 3500 repeat buyers as well as more than 1000 contacts from new and repeat consumers through the websites, marketing initiatives, organic search engine listings, Twitter, FaceBook and other social networking activities each day.  UE will use this broad reach to expose our cooperative’s products and services to this pool of potential customers while continuing to market and reach out to thousands more.

In the near future, Ujamaa Essentials will expand to host a co-op message board, physical marketplace events, small business workshops and other services small business owners and product makers.  We also plan to develop a YouTube channel where product testers can vlog about products from our cooperative.  The channel will also feature our cooperative’s product makers’ video tutorials, advertisements, interviews and more.

If you would like to join our collective and/or advertise to our members and customers, please contact us at info@ujamaaessentials.com.

Want information right now? Click HERE to download our Vendor Information Pack! All your questions and forms you need to get started! (pdf file - it may take a while to open depending on your connection speed. Please save and print this for easy reference)