At 6 feet tall, 3½ feet wide, and 645 pounds, Momba’s probably not a dead ringer for your mother. But maternal care—providing necessities and ensuring safety away from home—is the inspiration behind this customized, retrofitted vending machine designed for college campuses.
The idea for Momba (the name is a variation of “Mom bot”) grew from conversations between Heather Lapham Duque (MBA ’11) and her husband, Steven. “Momba was really my husband’s idea,” says the Baruch alumna and Momba CFO. Steven remembered that as a Harvard undergrad he sometimes had trouble finding and buying essentials, even in the relatively urban setting of Cambridge, Mass.
Enter Momba. The nontraditional, energy-efficient vending machines sell such dorm essentials as toothbrushes, shampoo, and phone chargers, and students are able to pay with cash, debit, credit, and campus currency. Parents, students, and college administrators alike hail the safety benefits: convenience without the security risk of leaving campus, especially at night.
“We didn’t know anything about vending machines when we started,” says Lapham Duque. But now the couple is expert in the nuts-and-bolts of their product, especially hands-on CEO Steven, who creates each Momba machine in the couple’s suburban Boston garage. He’s Momba only full-time employee. In addition to her duties as Momba CFO, Heather works full time as the North American financial monitoring director of VivaKi, a Publicis Groupe conglomerate.
The press Momba has received—including a fall 2012 Forbes magazine article about the first in-place machine, at Harvard—sent a lot of prospective customers their way. As did the Duques’ attendance at NEACUHO (Northeast Association of College and University Housing Officers) Residential Operations Conference in 2012. Now their most pressing problem is satisfying demand. “But we love having a big pipeline,” says Heather.
The Duques are particularly proud of their commitment to support higher education and individual students. No less than 10% of the annual profits from each machine is donated back to the host school’s financial aid program. Momba’s student entrepreneurs—at such schools as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Columbia University—who lobby on behalf of Momba, gain business experience and can earn commissions.
“It’s our joy to work on Momba,” says Lapham Duque, “and my Baruch education is the cornerstone of my ability to do what I do.”
—Diane Harrigan