By: Joseph Zuniga
Dominican University’s annual Entrepreneur’s Launchpad Fund (ELF) program concluded its 2026 competition, resulting in senior entrepreneurship student Joshua Ogiba winning the $10,000 grant.
This grant was awarded towards his business idea called Foamey.
Foamey is one of three business ideas Ogiba has developed over recent years. Foamey is a phone case brand focused on a waterproof, floating protective case.
The idea of Foamey originally came from high school, when Ogiba recalls losing his phone in a lake and watched it sink to the bottom of the lake. When Ogiba got a replacement phone, he looked for a floating waterproof case, but to his surprise, he found no such thing.
Then that’s when the idea came to Ogiba’s mind.
“We had this business class; we had to come up with an idea. I pitched the idea for my team of a floating waterproof case, and that’s where it all started.”
Ogiba remembers winning the high school business competition with this same idea and then went on to win several other competitions while here at Dominican before finally winning the $10,000 ELF grant.
Foamey is currently patent pending, with Ogiba working on getting the connections made for manufacturing the phone case at a mass scale.
The current problem is that the current prototype is not suitable yet for this mass-scale production, and Ogiba is working around this problem as he tests out new materials and different types of foam that work best.
Ogiba says that despite the trouble, he welcomes failure because of the lessons failure teaches.
“It’s very normal within business for things to go wrong, and that’s what makes great entrepreneurs. Not to give up and just to keep going. Failure is success. It’s something I live off of… Failure is what you learn from… I’m definitely a person who’s not scared of failure.”
As an ambitious entrepreneur, Ogiba has two other business ventures he has also been working on.
One business is in real estate photography and video called OGI Optics. Ogiba says that this business sprouted from his desire to be involved with real estate and also his desire to do videography and photography.
The other business venture sprouted up in a similar way as Foamey did. With a Google search, Ogiba was looking for a weight loss plan and found online coaching courses, but they held heavy price points. So, Ogiba decided to create an app. The app is unpublished for the moment as Ogiba works on it, but shows promise as Ogiba can attest to losing 45 pounds from following the app’s AI model.
Ogiba currently works on all his projects alone but still strives to show up everyday and has passion with everything he chooses to do.
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