By Maura Keating
Now that you’ve found the stroller of your dreams, you’ll need someplace to stash it. If you’re like most parents, you may find that babies come with an awful lot of stuff and all that stuff needs somewhere to go. The closet is the logical place to store your stroller, but what if your closet is already full? Keeping a stroller in the basement or the garage isn’t convenient for quick jaunts around the ’hood. If you’re living in an apartment, your neighbors will complain if you leave your stroller in the hall and it’s against fire codes anyway.
The StrollAway is designed to hang over a door and keep your stroller off your floor. Even if you have room in your closet, the StrollAway will save you from digging through the closet so that you can get out the door quickly.
The StrollAway fits over most doors with its wide metal ledge. Two metal hooks are capped with white plastic to avoid scuffing your stroller (or poking anyone’s eye out). Each hook can adjust to nine different settings, offering a variety of configurations for a diversity of strollers. The hooks that hold the stroller handles can be folded to the side of the door when they’re not holding the stroller. The entire contraption is made out of heavy-duty steel that won’t let you (or your stroller) down.
In my testing, I found that the StrollAway requires two things: 1. A door with enough space to access your stroller behind it, and 2. The StrollAway works best with single or continuous stroller handles. Double stroller handles do work, but they can hang precariously. I tested the StrollAway with the seven strollers featured in the Kidoinfo.com Stroller Review: the Quinny Buzz, the Uppababy G-Lite, the Bumbleride Indie, the Peg Perego Pliko, the B.O.B. Revolution, the Phil & Teds Sport, and the Mutsy Urban Rider. Since the B.O.B. Revolution does not lock when it’s folded, it was impossible to hang by its handles, and the Peg Perego’s double handles confounded both me and my husband. We emailed StrollAway and they suggested that we hang the Pliko by the fold handle and it worked! All other strollers (including some older models that we had) fit well on the StrollAway hooks, including the UPPAbaby G-LiTE’s double handles.
The busy inventors at Metro Tots are hard at work to bring you more clever storage solutions–an all mount version for the garage and a multi stroller system for those of you who didn’t find the perfect stroller the first time around. If you haven’t got room for your stroller in your closet, but you do have a door that can host a stroller, then the StrollAway is an ingenious invention that will clear up clutter and make getting out the door that much easier.
The Details: The StrollAway, $39.99, available at www.metrotots.com.
