My weekend's task was to unload our Stokke Xplory stroller on a worthy family. I failed. I relaxed my standards of worthiness somewhat and still failed. Worthy now meant just that someone possessed $125 dollars and the ability to send me an email. Sad. The folks on the neighborhood listserv don't know what they are missing.
I picked the stroller years before I knew I would be a father. My wife and I saw the Stokke in a showcase of Norwegian design in Washington's Union Station. Norway used to erect a Christmas tree in Union Station as part of a comprehensive annual gratitude package for the people of the United States. I think we got the tree for being an early country to recognize Norway's independence from Sweden. The tree was certainly the highlight of the display for most. I favored the train display. In the early aughts, I preferred the display of Norwegian design most of all.
That display featured the most outlandish baby stroller I had ever seen. It looked at first like a golf cart with an attached infant seat. The seat could slide up and down the central aluminum spine. It could also turn to face forward or back. The stroller suggested a life free from dirty restaurant high chairs, splashes, and barricades that might block the view of a child.
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| Golf Cart Image courtesy Golden Eagle Golf |
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| Stokke Xplory Photo courtesy your correspondent |
I was sure that only this stroller would do for my hypothetical future children. When my wife and I went stroller shopping, years later, we first had to track down this crazy Norwegian stroller. We had no idea of its name. That was easy. A Google search for 'crazy stroller' turned up the answer on the first page.
The second challenge came only when we learned that the stroller was about a thousand bucks. I've bought cars that cost less. The golf cart pictured above goes for about a hundred bucks. In the pantheon of expensive hobbies, babies rate above golf. They may even rate above sailing.
I decided that the idea of a kilobuck stroller was insane. I decided that the Stokke folks must be a similarly insane tribe of designers and artists and engineers. I rationalized the purchase as if I were
subsidizing public art through the installation of this small and portable kinetic sculpture.
Despite my poor luck with shifting the thing this weekend, I have come here to praise the Xplory, not to bury it. This stroller was amazing in ways I could not have previously imagined. I wanted to share some of those ways with you before the memory fades completely.
Let me get some of the downsides out of the way before I move on to the praise bit. The stroller is heavy. It is difficult to fold. When stored most compactly, it is split into two bulky pieces. I was unable to check it for air travel without using a large and expensive stroller body bag. A plastic lever broke. The storage was nearly useless. The cup holder was a literal afterthought. The brake can be difficult to operate. The seat is difficult to flip from front to rear facing without taking off the foot rest. People will constantly stop you on the street to ask about it.
A happy Xplory owner will probably live in a walkable city and walk with it. I lived in Washington at the time and it was perfect for me and my kids. I probably put a thousand walking miles on it. It was a delight to push from Capitol Hill to Georgetown on a nice day.
The trait that defines the Xplory is its stiffness. Stiffness is what lets you take long strides without banging your foot into a nightmare of accordioned folding bits. Stiffness is what lets you pick the whole thing up, including child, and carry it up stairs (EDITOR'S NOTE: NEVER DO THIS). Stiffness is
what enables off-axis thrust and navigation.
Off-axis thrust and navigation? These are not things I remember reading about in baby guides. Here's what it means in sailing terms: Most strollers are comfortable in only one point of sail -- running downwind with an adult directly behind pushing on both handles. The Stokke works fine with a single hand on the tiller. Not only that, the Stokke works fine in a broad reach with a hand anywhere on the large handle bar. The stiffness of the stroller and the height of the seat, when upright and facing forward, let the Stokke perform even in a beam reach.
I spent most of my time with it actually walking next to it and carrying it along with a hand on the child restraint bar. It was amazing to be able to talk to my children in the stroller while we were both facing forward. We walked hundreds of miles this way. I almost never used the vinyl rain cocoon thingy bundled with the stroller. Instead, I just walked along side it and shared my umbrella with comfort. I also found it pretty easy to push an infant in the Stokke and a toddler on a Kettler tricycle at the same time. This miracle helped me to get my youngest onto a bike much earlier than I otherwise would have been able to manage.
The stroller's stiffness comes in part from design and in part from quality. It should see service for at least a decade without difficulty. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of parting with the stroller is that I do not expect it to see out its entire useful life. In our part of the country, safety concerns over previously owned baby items make some only slightly more valuable second hand than radioactive waste. Even charities, perhaps especially charities, want nothing to do with most of what I have. I understand.
I understand that it can be difficult to reach unregistered owners with recall notices. I understand it can be difficult for new owners to discover the recall history for a gadget that may not have all its papers in order. I understand that new and ever better product safety regimes are difficult or impossible to apply to a product made years earlier. I still wonder if we have gone too far.
My children's car seats and boosters all have a use-by date. The old BMW wagon in which the seats are installed does not. The Stokke could have BPA or some other unfashionable substance buried somewhere it it. I got a whiff of the vinyl rain cover and guessed that it would not make a good chew toy. Could the stroller somehow be worse than a new Maclaren from China? I don't know.
I think the organic food folks might be able to help. We're expected to believe that baby stuff is up to snuff because it has a bunch of compliance marks on it. Organic folk also know to look for a special mark on their stuffs but they also know that each mushroom is traceable back to an actual farm. Even the inputs to that farm may be traceable back a few degrees.
If we can bother to make individual pieces of fruit traceable from 'farm to fork', perhaps it is not such a stretch to imagine the same for strollers, clothes, and toys. Organic foods labelled with the HarvestMark system can be traced by consumers prior to purchase directly from their telephones. Traceability could make it much easier to reason about the safety of a product later in its life. How much could it add to the cost of a thousand dollar stroller?
On the downside, we might be confronted with more than we really want to know about where our products come from and what they are made of.
I decided that the idea of a kilobuck stroller was insane. I decided that the Stokke folks must be a similarly insane tribe of designers and artists and engineers. I rationalized the purchase as if I were
subsidizing public art through the installation of this small and portable kinetic sculpture.
Despite my poor luck with shifting the thing this weekend, I have come here to praise the Xplory, not to bury it. This stroller was amazing in ways I could not have previously imagined. I wanted to share some of those ways with you before the memory fades completely.
Let me get some of the downsides out of the way before I move on to the praise bit. The stroller is heavy. It is difficult to fold. When stored most compactly, it is split into two bulky pieces. I was unable to check it for air travel without using a large and expensive stroller body bag. A plastic lever broke. The storage was nearly useless. The cup holder was a literal afterthought. The brake can be difficult to operate. The seat is difficult to flip from front to rear facing without taking off the foot rest. People will constantly stop you on the street to ask about it.
A happy Xplory owner will probably live in a walkable city and walk with it. I lived in Washington at the time and it was perfect for me and my kids. I probably put a thousand walking miles on it. It was a delight to push from Capitol Hill to Georgetown on a nice day.
The trait that defines the Xplory is its stiffness. Stiffness is what lets you take long strides without banging your foot into a nightmare of accordioned folding bits. Stiffness is what lets you pick the whole thing up, including child, and carry it up stairs (EDITOR'S NOTE: NEVER DO THIS). Stiffness is
what enables off-axis thrust and navigation.
 |
| Wheel wear on a non-stiff stroller Image courtesy a unsatisfied Maclaren owner on Yelp |
Off-axis thrust and navigation? These are not things I remember reading about in baby guides. Here's what it means in sailing terms: Most strollers are comfortable in only one point of sail -- running downwind with an adult directly behind pushing on both handles. The Stokke works fine with a single hand on the tiller. Not only that, the Stokke works fine in a broad reach with a hand anywhere on the large handle bar. The stiffness of the stroller and the height of the seat, when upright and facing forward, let the Stokke perform even in a beam reach.
I spent most of my time with it actually walking next to it and carrying it along with a hand on the child restraint bar. It was amazing to be able to talk to my children in the stroller while we were both facing forward. We walked hundreds of miles this way. I almost never used the vinyl rain cocoon thingy bundled with the stroller. Instead, I just walked along side it and shared my umbrella with comfort. I also found it pretty easy to push an infant in the Stokke and a toddler on a Kettler tricycle at the same time. This miracle helped me to get my youngest onto a bike much earlier than I otherwise would have been able to manage.
The stroller's stiffness comes in part from design and in part from quality. It should see service for at least a decade without difficulty. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of parting with the stroller is that I do not expect it to see out its entire useful life. In our part of the country, safety concerns over previously owned baby items make some only slightly more valuable second hand than radioactive waste. Even charities, perhaps especially charities, want nothing to do with most of what I have. I understand.
I understand that it can be difficult to reach unregistered owners with recall notices. I understand it can be difficult for new owners to discover the recall history for a gadget that may not have all its papers in order. I understand that new and ever better product safety regimes are difficult or impossible to apply to a product made years earlier. I still wonder if we have gone too far.
My children's car seats and boosters all have a use-by date. The old BMW wagon in which the seats are installed does not. The Stokke could have BPA or some other unfashionable substance buried somewhere it it. I got a whiff of the vinyl rain cover and guessed that it would not make a good chew toy. Could the stroller somehow be worse than a new Maclaren from China? I don't know.
I think the organic food folks might be able to help. We're expected to believe that baby stuff is up to snuff because it has a bunch of compliance marks on it. Organic folk also know to look for a special mark on their stuffs but they also know that each mushroom is traceable back to an actual farm. Even the inputs to that farm may be traceable back a few degrees.
If we can bother to make individual pieces of fruit traceable from 'farm to fork', perhaps it is not such a stretch to imagine the same for strollers, clothes, and toys. Organic foods labelled with the HarvestMark system can be traced by consumers prior to purchase directly from their telephones. Traceability could make it much easier to reason about the safety of a product later in its life. How much could it add to the cost of a thousand dollar stroller?
On the downside, we might be confronted with more than we really want to know about where our products come from and what they are made of.
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