Hello all

This is our first post... so it will be a bit of a long one just to update everyone on what has been going on- so much that we just had to start this blog. We are a group of year 8 students from Manchester Academy, and we have set up a company in order to trade with schools in other countries we are currently liaising with a school in Ecuador.

Back in September Mrs Rashid did an assembly to recruit staff for this project and we had to apply by filling out an application form...the first session was an introduction to the EJE project and what it was all about. We were very excited about the journey we were about to embark on.

The following sessions were about giving all the team job roles within the business, deciding on a business name, completing the necessary documentation, designing logos. This was followed by registering with the EJE organisation and waiting to see which school we would be partnered with. We found out that we woule be partnered with Ecuador.

We also found out the different departments in our company we would be working in such as international sales, finance and research. After we did that, we organised emails between us and our partner school in Ecuador about the sort of things that we would be selling to them and what they would be selling to them. We decided that our merchandise was going to be based on Manchester United as that was a topic that many of the kids in Ecuador liked. The school in Ecuador would be selling us jewellery made from a plant called taquia.

We spent many hours researching Manchester United based products and putting up catalogues containing the products that we would like to buy. After that, we went to Sports Direct to buy the products we had chosen. Since only 4 people could go, it was a complete privilage and honour to be part of the 4 people choosing our products.

We ended up leaving Sports Direct with a lot of Manchester United based products such as pens, hats, bears and money boxes with chocolate in them! As we still had quite a bit of time left, we decided to go into more shops to see any other possible things we could buy. That's when we saw some Mother's Day gifts. The gifts inspired us to sell a bit of Mother's Day gifts to earn extra money to buy more products.