Her sister struggled with feeding breast milk on the go – so this 23-year-old invented a better way

Her sister struggled with feeding breast milk on the go – so this 23-year-old invented a better way Nicolette Wong discovered that parents often pieced together different products to store, warm and feed breast milk on the go. Her answer was Momigo, an all-in-one system that made her the Singapore winner of the James Dyson Award 2026. Nicolette Wong picked breastfeeding as her thesis project in her final year of industrial design at the National University of Singapore. Her sister Stephanie had just given birth to her first child and Wong witnessed firsthand the challenges she faced with breastfeeding. “I thought (breastfeeding) would be very natural, very easy – but it wasn’t for my sister,” the 23-year-old told CNA Women. She also saw her sister and brother-in-law struggle with bottle-feeding breast milk to their baby while they were out – from warming the expressed milk efficiently to pouring it from the storage bag into a feeding bottle. This made her decide to focus her design project on the “logistical burden of breastfeeding”. “As I spoke to more parents, I realised that each breastfeeding on-the-go product functioned independently, and parents had to piece together all of these different products into one continuous journey,” Wong explained. “So this led me to the idea of a bottle-bag system designed around the entire experience, rather than individual steps.” The result is Momigo, a reusable silicone breast milk storage and feeding system. On Wednesday (Sep 16), Wong was named the national winner of the James Dyson Award 2026. The competition, which is marking its 20th anniversary, celebrates problem-solving inventions by current and recent university students in engineering, product design and industrial design. Wong received S$8,620 to support the next stage of Momigo’s development and proceeds to the international stage, where she has a chance to win the top prize of S$51,700. The winner will be handpicked by James Dyson, the English inventor who founded household appliances brand Dyson, in November. ONE CONTINUOUS BREASTFEEDING JOURNEY The Momigo system allows expressed breast milk to be stored, warmed and fed from the same container – a silicone bag with a circular opening and a tapered base – turning storage, warming and feeding into a single, continuous journey. After pumping, mothers can pour their expressed breast milk into the silicone bag, which seals into a thin profile for storage in the fridge or freezer. Before heading out, parents fill Momigo’s insulated flask with hot water. At feeding time, all they have to do is clip the silicone milk bag onto the lid of the flask and let it sit in warm water for around three minutes. The bag can then be slid out of the flask, unclipped and slotted into a plastic holder. Attach a teat and it’s ready for a hungry baby. The system reduces the number of products that need to be washed, as well as minimises the risk of spillage that often happens when pouring milk from one vessel to another. “The main focus is the silicone bag but because I wanted to design it for this continuous experience – designing the supporting components was necessary as well,” Wong said. For her final prototypes, Wong created a 3D-printed mould for the storage bag, then mixed and cast the silicone. The plastic bottle and insulated flask were 3D-printed too; the actual flask will be made of metal. Wong used an existing, commercially available silicone teat, as the teat itself wasn’t a focus of her design innovation. “I looked at the current market and realised disposable solutions create continual waste and expose milk to microplastics during freezing and warming stages,” Wong explained. “Whereas the reusable solutions were very bulky to store and transport, and they only allow for warming of milk in bottles which generally takes longer than warming in bags.” She added: “That’s the biggest difference between momigo and what’s on the market right now. No material is completely impact-free but silicone aligned better with the system that I was trying to create.” INPUT FROM PARENTS AND LACTATION EXPERTS Wong began working on Momigo in August 2025. She spoke to lactation consultants for expert knowledge and reached out to more than 15 parents to get different perspectives on the breastfeeding journey. However, she couldn’t test the product with their babies because the components that make up Momigo are prototypes. She narrowed her focus to the silicone bottle-bag concept around October 2025 and the bulk of the prototyping and refinement that led to the final outcome was carried out in early 2026. “I was printing non-stop at one point, just to try and figure out what I could create. I brought my prototypes to parents as well, to get their feedback,” said Wong. She described the 10 months working on Momigo as “a very, very arduous process” and “the longest design project I’ve worked on” but said she was pleased with the end product. “I really wanted to intervene into this space meaningfully so I took a lot of time considering every single design requirement that was necessary, trying to balance the different stages,” she recalled. She said that not being a parent helped in developing Momigo. “I heard a super wide range of preferences and I realised parents have their own ways of doing things even if they have the exact same products.” CONTRIBUTING TO CONVERSATIONS ABOUT MOTHERHOOD CARE Wong graduated in July and is currently job hunting. “I’m hoping to go into research and development. I’m interested in the research side of things, like consumer insights, then translating that into a physical product,” she said. This isn’t her first invention, though. She was previously part of a group project that created Stomo, a wearable stoma care training toolkit for nursing students. Wong explained: “It was developed in collaboration with NUS Nursing to help nursing students build confidence before caring for real patients. We produced six wearable Stomo models and handed them over to NUS Nursing for pilot testing with students in a training setting.” Wong admitted she was “taken by surprise” when she found out she was the national winner of this year’s James Dyson Award. “I was in Johor Bahru with my friends when I got the call; I was quite shocked,” she said. “But I was very happy and very thankful too, for the opportunity to share my project. “I hope it can open doors to contribute to conversations about how we design for motherhood care as a whole – that’s quite important to me.” Wong plans to use the prize money to develop momigo into a commercial product. “I’m open to opportunities to help bring Momigo closer to real-world use, whether through further development, collaboration or industry expertise,” she said. “There’s still a lot I want to validate, particularly around the materials and manufacturing, and extended user testing. “I’m quite excited to see where the recognition or attention from this award might take the project and I’ll consider these next steps as the right opportunities arise. There’s no specific timeline for commercialisation at the moment,” she added. So, what does her sister think of her win? “She is very proud of me. She’s also happy that she got to share her experience. It was also very meaningful for me to be able to bring to light all the voices of the parents that I heard along the way,” said Wong. CNA Women is a section on CNA Lifestyle that seeks to inform, empower and inspire the modern woman. If you have women-related news, issues and ideas to share with us, email CNAWomen [at] mediacorp.com.sg.