Bugaboo Heads West

New York City seems like it should be the heart of Bugaboo country. The Dutch company specializes in 20-pound curb-hopping strollers (great for bumping over epic potholes, not great for popping in the trunk to head to the mall). Their most popular model–the Frog–costs $759. (The foam-tire Cameleon is $880.) The price points on their Marc Jacobs and (Red) limited editions ($1,500 and $1,029 respectively) are a lot more Wall Street than Sesame Street.

So when the country’s first Bugaboo retail store opened up this month in El Segundo, a humble slice of Los Angeles, just south of LAX, it seemed curious. I already had the family down visiting in-laws for the week, and I took them and went there undercover–which is pretty easy when you’re a dadblogger–to check it out.

Here’s what I know about El Segundo: it used to be home to a colossally screwed and landless tribe called the Tongva. It has massive oil refineries. Someone from A Tribe Called Quest left their wallet there. It ain’t exactly Park Slope.

The first thing I learned when we pulled up is that it’s not really a store, per se, with any grand retail ambitions. It’s more like a showroom attached to Bugaboo’s new corporate headquarters. The company had outgrown the converted auto-body shop it was occupying down the road in Hermosa Beach (30 employees sharing a bathroom, apparently). So they moved to El Segundo, which won an Eddy Award a few years ago for being the most business-friendly city in the region. The showroom is in front, but just behind it is a bright peppermint-green kitchen (painted the owner’s favorite color), which leads to the cavernous open-plan workspace where the worker bees of Bugaboo (sales? design? accounting?) do their thing.

The upside to the accidental location was that we had to place all to ourselves, along with the undivided attention of the hyperkinetic and enthusiastic account manager named Ricardo who was manning the place. He had relocated from New York not long ago when Bugaboo closed its offices near Madison Square Park and he sounded a little wistful about NYC–he told a few totally New York food-geek stories, about how the Bugaboo staff would monitor the line at the Shake Shack via Webcam and then dash down three flights of stairs when it was short enough. I told him about Tito’s Tacos, but I have a feeling it won’t make him forget all about the Shackburgers.

But he was awesomely indulgent of my kids, who wanted to climb all over the products, and sit in the mesh bags, and push the strollers into walls. And he gave us a sneak preview of the new updated Bee stroller, due out in April, which is basically the same, just a bit sturdier and a bit more expensive, with a slightly more user-friendly strap and thinner side flaps.

Here’s the thing: in New York, I hated Bugaboos. I owned McClarens, which cost a third as much, and $20 Target umbrella strollers, and I was all too ready to buy into the stroller wars pitting haughty Bugaboo owners against the angry rabble rest of us. But in Los Angeles, all that seems petty and judgmental. Yes, $800 is a lot for a stroller, but you do actually get something for the price: design and function. Maybe not where I’d invest, but people spend lots of money on all kinds of geegaws, so why not strollers?  We owned a TV that cost more the Cameleon stroller and got a lot less use. Others (like Matt, who owns a Frog) can tell you with more authority about the suspension and the steering and the shocks over the long-haul. But from our short visit, it did just seem all very buttery.

Not that we left with a new stroller, mainly because we don’t quite have $800 to spend on anything at the moment. But if we did, we would. And there’s going to be a big sale, I’m told, so you should: June 19, 30 percent off everything. Only in-store, only in beautiful El Segundo.