Of all of the purchasing decisions you make in the lead-up to having a baby, choosing a stroller is arguably the biggest one. It’s generally the largest single-item financial investment you will make up front, and because it’s gear, it’s often one of the items that husbands get involved in choosing.
I will be honest: I agonized for months when it came to choosing a stroller and nearly drove both my husband, and myself, mad in the process. Now, I’m generally a decisive person with a very clear idea of what I like and what I want. To put it in context, two far more significant decisions — purchasing an SUV, and moving from our downtown condo to a suburban home — in advance of the baby’s arrival were made far more quickly than the stroller purchase. It took us maybe two weeks to test drive, choose, and lease our SUV of choice. From the date we decided to move from a condo to a house, it took us five weeks to see properties, secure a house, lease out our condo, and move. So given that I’m not usually an indecisive mental case, why did I become one when choosing a stroller, and what made this particular decision so hard?
I think there are a few reasons why choosing a stroller, or at least, choosing a stroller you will be very happy with long term are manifold:
- It’s a completely foreign product category. Unlike clothes, shoes, cars, houses, or what-have-you, you’ve likely never paid attention to, thought about, or even noticed strollers or stroller brands before becoming a parent.
- It’s expensive. Stroller and car seat travel systems can cost $1500-$2000 if purchasing new. It’s a lot of money to spend and it’s money usually spent before the baby is born; you are trying to predict what will work for you as a parent, without first having experienced parenthood in any form. It’s like asking someone to buy a car before they’ve ever driven a car, or even taken a driving lesson! Deciding what car to buy when you’ve never driven a car, is much harder than purchasing a car once you’ve taken lessons, test driven cars, and been in other people’s cars.
- It’s difficult for someone else, whether a salesperson or an online guide, to tell you what will work well for you. Unlike something static like baby clothes, where I can objectively tell you what’s the softest fabric or holds up best in the wash, strollers are dynamic and will function differently for every individual. Every individual will have a unique experience with a stroller, depending on environment, lifestyle, and preferences. What’s great for me may be terrible for you, and vice versa.
Where to start? While I have yet to find a great online guide that breaks stroller selection down into a simple framework with a clear endpoint, there are some great overviews of strollers out there, particularly on YouTube.
Three of my favourite YouTube channels are:
Both Magic Beans and Strolleria are US-retailers with a physical and online presence. Both channels are useful if you’re looking for a comprehensive overview of brands and models, and particularly if you want to see what’s new when a new model comes out. For instance, I haven’t seen the Bugaboo Fox 3 in stores but Magic Beans posted a great video showcasing the differences between the Fox 2 and Fox 3, allowing the consumer to make an informed decision re purchasing the Fox 2 at discount or purchasing the Fox 3. Similarly, I haven’t seen the Uppababy Ridge in person yet, but was curious when I heard about it’s launch, and Magic Beans again had an early video reviewing the model. I find that both channels tend to showcase the products well and present the salient features but, as retailers, understandably stop short of suggesting brand X is better than brand Y or model A is better than model B.
The Stroller Workshop is far and way my favorite stroller review channel, and I must admit, something of a niche interest. My husband laughs whenever he sees me watching The Stroller Workshop because the videos are seemingly quite dry. The Stroller Workshop is a stroller repair shop in Norway. The videos typically show only a stroller and a pair of legs — only in one video have I seen the face behind the voice — and quite literally dissect the nuts and bolts of a stroller. What I love about The Stroller Workshop is that, because it’s a repair shop they are in legitimate position to comment on the build quality, functionality, and longevity of strollers. Moreover, precisely because they are not retailers, The Stroller Workshop is able to rank strollers in terms of quality, durability, etc. I find their videos very informative and can safely say that I learned more from The Stroller Workshop than any other source.
There are a number of websites and blog posts about stroller selection. The well known review site Wirecutter has a feature on the best strollers although neither their top pick, the Baby Jogger City Mini 2 or their upgrade pick, the Uppababy Cruz, featured very highly in my personal search for a stroller. One blog post I particularly enjoyed, and now can’t find again, was written by a woman who moved from America to France with an Uppababy Vista, and promptly replaced her Uppababy Vista with a Babyzen Yoyo. Her post was a perfect example of how the “right” stroller is contingent on environment and lifestyle. The Uppababy Vista may be ideal in a North American environment where space is plentiful, vehicles are large, and elevators are ubiquitous. In a European context, with narrower streets and doorways, smaller vehicles, and walk up apartments in elevator-less buildings, the same stroller could very well quickly prove to be a nightmare.
What about in store shopping? In store shopping is a tricky one. While it’s an absolute must to trial strollers in person, I do think you have to be cautious to balance perspectives and biases when you visit a baby shop and speak with a salesperson. For that reason, I would strongly suggest visiting more than one baby store and talking to varied sales people before you make a purchase.
I say this because we started our search for a stroller with a visit to West Coast Kids. I knew Uppababy and Bugaboo were two of the “main” brands and was interested in checking out both. The staff at West Coast Kids are great — friendly and helpful and willing to show newbs like us the ropes. The salesperson we spoke to, and perhaps it was just this one salesperson, was extremely pro-Uppababy. Pro-Uppababy to the point that while he was happy to show us the Cruz and the Vista V2 at length, he largely glossed over the entire Bugaboo range. I would say that we were actively discouraged from considering Bugaboo with comments centring around Bugaboo being too hard to fold and too complex and impractical for most parents to use. If an hour was spent on Uppababy, perhaps five minutes or less were dedicated to showing Bugaboo strollers, let alone other brands in the store.
We were strongly shepherded towards Uppababy, and specifically to the Cruz over the Vista V2. The Cruz, their top seller, was billed as a stroller suitable for the city and fine to use in Toronto’s weather and terrain, even with snow on the ground. The more robust Vista V2 was billed as an all terrain stroller. As the now owner of a Vista V2, I can tell you that in my opinion, the Vista V2 is far from an all terrain stroller, and the Cruz even less so. While both strollers can handle snow and terrain, they do not do so with aplomb; the strollers rattle and shake and the pushee has a very different experience from the pusher.
I suspect that one of the primary reasons for this strongly pro-Uppababy approach, where we were essentially presented two strollers within one brand to choose from, is simply for efficiency’s sake. If you’re a busy store, and a busy salesperson, having this conversation multiple times per day, at some point, the risk is that the conversation becomes canned rather than customized to the individual consumer. If you know that most upper middle class urbanite parents in Toronto are purchasing Uppababy, and more are purchasing the Cruz than the Vista V2, why not save yourself the trouble of taking customers through the whole range of options and narrow the customer’s focus to a more manageable bite-size selection based on what the majority of customers with the same profile buy?
I mention this encounter only because I think many of us, especially when brand new to the baby gear category, still rely heavily on advice from sales people. If this advice is inaccurate, canned, or worse, biased, we can easily be misled, ending up with the wrong, final sale, purchase.
Now, I will say, most Toronto stores seem to share this bias towards Uppababy. Certainly, Uppababy is the most ubiquitous stroller brand among our social group and what we typically see downtown and midtown. This may be because it’s a great brand with exceptional customer service, a stylish and practical product, good quality, and until recently, a better price point than their main competitor, Bugaboo. It is also a US company rather than a European one and I think there is always some proximity and perhaps cultural bias. I do wonder, however, if there are other reasons Uppababy is pushed heavily in stores. I have heard, but obviously not verified independently, that the profit margin for retailers on Bugaboo is very slim. If true, retailers would obviously be less incentivized to sell this brand, and this is something for the consumer to consider as well when relying on advice.
In fairness to the many hardworking and earnest salespeople that we encountered, it is very difficult for them to advise us on what will work best for us when all they know about us is what we tell them. And as parents-to-be, I’m not sure how clear any of us are in describing who we will be as parents. After all, we haven’t experienced parenthood and don’t yet know the answer ourselves.
So, how do I choose the right stroller?
My top three pieces of advice when choosing a stroller are to:
- If possible, wait till you have the baby to choose the stroller.
- Test drive the stroller. And truly test drive it. Don’t just test it on the smooth shiny floor of the baby store, ask to take it outside and test it on the sidewalk, over a curb, on a broken patch of road, on a dirt trail, etc.
- Purchase only from a retailer that accepts returns. Better yet, purchase directly from the manufacturer if they offer a no risk trial program.
Now, I did none of these things. But if I was to do it again, or do it over, I would follow this advice, particularly point number 3.
I found that my in store stroller shopping sessions focused on functionality for the parent. How easy was the stroller to fold, how heavy was it to carry, how compatible was the car seat when used as a travel system, etc. There was little to no discussion about the experience for the baby in the stroller. Now that I have a baby, while functionality and ease of use for me is important, my primary concern, especially while the baby is very young, is that my baby is comfortable in the stroller. I don’t want her to be whimpering with every jolt in the sidewalk; I want good shock absorption and a nice smooth rattle-free ride, at very least over basic city terrain.
The greatest heresy when it comes to stroller shopping is that, yes, we test drive strollers but we do so in a completely artificial controlled environment. Indoors on perfectly even, perfectly smooth, shiny waxed floors. This environment does not come close to simulating the true day to day performance of the stroller. Unless you are someone who only plans to use the stroller inside a mall or in a big box store, you will not replicate this push experience. MEC, or Mountain Equipment Co-Op, the popular outdoors store has a large boulder in their shoe section. When you try on hiking boots, the staff will ask you to stand on the boulder, climb it, etc. to simulate what it would feel like to use these boots for the function for which they were designed. Even better, MEC lets you try the boots and hike with them, with the option to return them if they don’t suit you. Now, do I think stores are going to say yes when you ask to push a stroller outdoors on real sidewalks, no. Do I think that they should, or at very least, have some sort of simulated rough floor surface for you to try pushing on, yes.
In Toronto anyway, it’s the norm that items purchased from dedicated local baby stores are final sale. I understand that stores do this to protect themselves from unscrupulous buyers who would otherwise buy, use, and return items. Baby stores are particularly at risk for this behaviour due to the short utility span of many of the items they sell. That said, there are very few $1500 purchases I’ve made in life which are a hard final sale.
Asking a novice consumer to make a binding commitment to a stroller, without even the option to return or exchange unused merchandise within a fixed timeframe, is, in my opinion unfair to the consumer. Sometimes, after all, things change or you really do have to make a genuine return. A friend got a great deal on a brand new in box Uppababy Vista V2 online, $1100 all in, on Marketplace because the seller had received two identical strollers at her baby shower but couldn’t return either one because they were final sale purchases. Similarly, I saw and tried to snag, a Bugaboo Fox 2 that was being sold brand new in box online for $1000 due to an identical scenario. I, personally, am out almost $700 on a Nuna Rava car seat due to similar policies. My brother was planning to visit with his toddler son and asked me to order a convertible car seat for his son to use while visiting — with the understanding that we would be able to put it to use 18 months later once our baby was born and big enough to need it. I ordered it from Love Me Do Baby & Maternity, a store I really like and try to support, only to learn the next day that my brother had decided not to fly with his son after all. I’m now stuck with a car seat I don’t need yet; had the option been open to me, I would have liked to return, and wait to purchase closer to when my daughter actually needed the seat. After all, newer and better models are always coming out and why tie up $700 in cash 18 months in advance?
As much as I want to support local businesses, rigid return policies make it difficult to do so. Where possible, I’ve started buying big ticket baby items from Nordstrom Canada due to their generous return policy.
In the US, the situation is far more consumer friendly. Target, Nordstrom, and others have generous return policies. I believe Amazon US allows returns on Amazon Baby Registry items for up to 1 year. And, best of all, Bugaboo offers a 3 month no risk free trial on any full price Bugaboo stroller! I did a lot of research when I chose our stroller but sadly I didn’t come across this offer until my baby was already born, and I was already committed to my stroller. Had I known this in advance, given that our baby was born in Los Angeles, I would have 100% opted for the Bugaboo free trial. I hope that some day other major manufacturers offer this type of program, and in Canada to boot, so that moms can make a truly informed choice before they finalize their purchase. Check it out here!
Milk & Money 