The Age of Bugaboo Strollers
Not long ago, the folks at Bugaboo had a problem.
“…we realized that some of our consumers were not buying their strollers for the right reasons,” Max Barenbrug, the original designer and creator of Bugaboo, said in an interview with the British magazine, Contagious, last year.
You have to give the company credit. It actually bothered them that folks were lining up to spend $900 on their strollers only because they’d seen Madonna with one, or, perhaps more likely, the mom down the street.
So they started a campaign to educate the buyer, on their website and in the stores, with details sometimes missed in the captions of Us Weekly. If you have a few hours, you, too, can watch video of Barenbrug explaining his creations, or click on a breakdown of the chassis and swivel wheels.
Add this to the list of contradictions that define the Bugaboo. It’s such a simple stroller, it takes hours to explain.
The initial wave of hoopla has passed since Bugaboo hit the scene about a decade ago. The babies of the “Sex and the City” generation are now in grade school, and their younger siblings might just as likely be pushed around in a Mountain Buggy or Uppa, or Quinny, or Maclaren, or dare I say, worn in a sling, as driven in a Bugaboo Frog of yesterday.
Still, Bugaboo changed the landscape. It is, as Bryan Pulice, of the Santa Monica store, Traveling Tikes, said, the “grandfather” of the modern stroller. As a parent who came of age in this decade, I love the Bugaboo and I hate it. Usually at the same time. And, I don’t even own one.
Janet McLaughlin, runs Stroller Swap, a group on Yahoo that has about 10,000 members. She’s owned more than 270 strollers and is, in person and online, the Stroller Queen. She says Bugaboo was revolutionary in three ways. It made Americans face their children in strollers, again, the way prams always have; it brought back the bassinet; and it convinced other companies that US parents would spend more than $400 on a stroller.
“They are unquestionably the company that broke the barrier on money—the sky is the limit.”
Sarah Vander Schaaff is the mother of two little redheaded girls, a drama teacher, and a writer. She started the blog, Lunch Box Mom in an effort to save her sanity and her brain. She posts once a week about topics related to parenthood.
