Business executive, PhD engineer, inventor, entrepreneur – Carr Lane Quackenbush’s diverse combination of talents, skills, and experiences now converge in the commercial launch of mōmi brands, inc. 

Beginning his career as a ceramics engineer designing parts for experimental gas turbines and Formula One engines, Carr Lane’s business acumen and leadership skills ultimately led to the position of President of Medela Inc. in the year 2000.  Medela is one of the world’s most prominent breast pump companies.

Over the next eleven years, Carr Lane led Medela through a season of tremendous growth.  He attributes this success primarily  to realigning the organization – recruiting strong leaders and empowering them to lead.  Each business unit was given autonomy to serve its own market, with dedicated marketing, engineering, and sales teams.

When he retired from Medela in 2011 he felt his work in this field was not yet done.  He was convinced the industry had not cracked the code on replicating the natural biomechanics of breastfeeding – from both the breast pump and the bottle nipple sides of the equation.  “In the same way a bottle is an artificial breast, a baby is also a pump,” he likes to remind us. 

Stepping down from the leadership of a large organization provided him the mindspace to return to his roots, thinking about the problem from an engineering perspective.  He immersed himself in the scientific literature to understand the natural physiology of breastfeeding.  Approaching the current body of scientific knowledge with an engineering mindset and rich industry experience, he formed clear hypotheses around the ways current bottle feeding and breast pump technologies differed from natural biomechanics. He also formed hypotheses  around which of those differences mattered, and why.

He then set about to innovate both a pump and a bottle nipple that would replicate natural function in ways no product on the market had achieved.

Nine years later, after thousands of hours in his basement workshop, hundreds of tediously hand-made prototypes, and substantial investment of his own capital, he holds issued patents on game-changing innovations in both the bottle nipple and breast pump technologies.

Today he and the mōmi team are proud to be bringing these innovations to market.