The single-stroller fantasy

Every new parent runs the same audit. You compare folds, weights, recline angles, basket sizes, wheel diameters, and your eye eventually lands on the one stroller that you tell yourself will be enough. It will handle the daily commute, the trail walks, the airport, the supermarket, and the long afternoons when the baby falls asleep on a long push.

We did the audit. The shortlist came down to three cabin-compact contenders: the Bugaboo Butterfly, the Joolz Aer2, and the BABYZEN YOYO (sold today as the Stokke YOYO3). Plus one outlier, the Thule Urban Glide 2 (current model the Urban Glide 3).

Our first child, our son, was born in New Zealand during COVID. International travel was effectively off the table. What we did instead was walk. Long walks through Auckland streets, longer walks on NZ trails, days that started at one park and ended at another with the baby asleep through both. We made a decision that we now realise was the right one for a reason none of the cabin-compact reviews surface.

We bought the outlier: the Thule Urban Glide 2.

Why the Thule Urban Glide came first, and why we would do it again

Air-pumped tyres. That is the part no review headline leads with, and it is the part that quietly mattered most for the first six months of our son's life.

A newborn does not yet have neck control. Every bump the stroller absorbs is a bump the baby does not. The Urban Glide 2's air tyres turn every footpath crack, every cobble, every gutter-edge into something the chassis absorbs before the seat does. We walked our son up and down hilly Auckland streets, across grass parks, through wet New Zealand winters, and onto the kind of half-trail that the Butterfly, the Aer2, and the YOYO would have struggled with. None of it shook him awake.

The other thing the Urban Glide quietly does is carry everything. The basket below holds a diaper bag, a change of clothes, a thermos, a fold-out picnic blanket, and the day's groceries on the way home. We stopped carrying a separate bag. The stroller became the day.

There is a third thing, which is not in the spec sheet at all. You set it up and you go. There is no fold-into-cabin-size step every time you reach the car. There is no a la carte recline mechanism to fight with. You unfold, you click, you push. For a parent with a sleeping infant, the difference between a stroller you set up in 90 seconds and a stroller you set up in 8 seconds is the difference between the baby waking up and the baby not.

And the breakdown is faster than the spec sheet suggests. There is a push-to-release button on each of the two rear wheels. You twist the handle to fold the chassis, push the buttons to pop the wheels off, and the whole thing slides into the boot of the car. Five to eight seconds, start to finish. The Urban Glide is not what most parents would call compact, but it-fits-in-the-car compact is a different number from it-fits-overhead compact, and on the it-fits-in-the-car measure the Urban Glide is faster than reviews ever credit.

People may complain about how big your stroller is. But if your priority is your child instead of other people's complaints, the Urban Glide wins hands down.

We are aware that this is not the consensus on cabin-compact parenting forums. The Urban Glide is large. It does not fold to overhead-bin dimensions. It does not look elegant collapsed in the corner of a cafe. None of that mattered to us. The newborn did. The newborn does.

So why did we end up buying a second stroller

Our daughter.

Specifically: she flew, and earlier than her brother had. COVID restrictions had eased by the time she was born, and we found ourselves on planes again. Red-eyes with both children in tow, weekends in Singapore, the Japan trips that her brother had not been old enough to take. The Urban Glide will not go in an overhead bin and it will not go through a regular airline carry-on test. To bring it on a flight you check it at the gate. It joins the conveyor belt with the rest of the gate-checked oversized gear, gets handled by ground staff, and eventually, statistically, in our experience, something on it gets damaged. We have lost a wheel cap to one airline and seen the basket strap return mangled from another. An Urban Glide chassis is not cheap to replace.

We did not want to spend our trips worrying about whether our stroller would survive the round trip. That is when the YOYO entered the household, for our daughter specifically and the family generally.

The flight pattern, the actual reason the YOYO earns its keep

This is the part no stroller review covers, because no stroller review tracks a family at 2 AM in an airport terminal with two children.

We fly red-eyes deliberately. The benefits with young children are tremendous, which is its own piece worth writing. After check-in, we put our daughter in the YOYO seat, our son stands on the YOYO bench-board attachment behind, our hand-carries hang from the chassis, and we push the entire family configuration with one hand through the terminal. No child running into a duty-free display. No bag in the other hand. No "where is your sister." A single coordinated unit through immigration, through the gate, through to the jetway.

At the jetway we fold the YOYO. It clips down to a shape that goes overhead. It does not get checked. It does not go on the conveyor belt. It does not come back damaged. We carry it onto the plane, slide it into the bin, and sit down with our children.

This is not a feature in the YOYO's marketing copy. It is what the YOYO actually does in our lives.

Japan, and why the YOYO works there more than anywhere

There is a stroller for every city, and the YOYO is the stroller for Japan.

Japanese urbanism is built around tight spatial economies. Restaurants seat you eight to a counter. Trains arrive at platforms designed for the volume of bodies they carry. Department stores are vertical, not sprawling. The Urban Glide in Japan would have spent half its time being asked, politely, to be moved. The YOYO did not.

The image that lodges in our memory is this. A small sushi bar in a side street in Tokyo. We folded the YOYO at the entrance, carried it three metres to our seats, and placed it on the floor in front of our knees, the way you would put a backpack. The stroller sat there for the meal. We watched the chef. The children watched the chef. The YOYO did not need a parking spot. It did not need an apologetic conversation with the proprietor. It was just there, folded, the size of a small bag, waiting.

Another data point worth noting: in Japan, other parents are mostly using the YOYO too. That is not a coincidence. The YOYO works in Japan the way an espresso machine works in Italy. The form factor matches the city.

The accessory pickup that we did not plan

On one trip, in March, snow arrived that the forecast had not predicted. We had packed for mild weather. Our daughter was in a stroller built for Singapore.

We walked into a department store. Not a baby specialist. A regular department store. They had three YOYO accessories on the floor, in stock, that day: a handle mitt for the parent pushing, a leg muff for the child, and a rain cover. We bought all three and walked out ten minutes later with a stroller that was suddenly winter-ready.

This is not a story about three accessories. It is a story about ecosystem density. When a stroller's accessory range is dense enough that a department store in a foreign country stocks them on the floor, you have an answer to "what happens when the unexpected happens" that no other shortlist contender could match.

What five years of YOYO ownership actually cost us

The headline number for a new Stokke YOYO3 today on Amazon ranges from US$399.99 for the Black/Taupe base configuration to around US$499.00 for the Ginger and other colourways. That is the new-stroller price. It is not the price we paid.

We bought our YOYO chassis secondhand from a family whose toddler had aged out of it. The chassis was perfect. The seat was tired. We went to the local Stokke dealer and bought a replacement seat plus a new colour pack (Amazon stocks the OEM textiles too) at roughly NZ$150 at dealer retail. Refreshed stroller. New seat, new canopy. The expensive part, the chassis, was untouched.

When our second child arrived, we did it again. Same chassis. New seat. Fresh canopy. A stroller that looked and rode like new, for the price of a seat unit, not a stroller.

The dealer is the retail-priced option, and they stock the OEM colour packs. The cheaper alternative, which we have also used, is the Amazon-listed compatible kit. A Feliliber 6-piece replacement kit for the YOYO2 (the chassis is mechanically compatible with the YOYO3) is around US$65.78 at the time of writing. Roughly a third of the dealer price.

We have used both. The dealer pack is finished a little better. The Amazon pack is functionally identical at the seat-cushion-and-canopy level for materially less money. Pick the one that matches how much you care about the colour-matching finish versus the cost.

That is a TCO conversation no review writes for you. Across our five-year ownership window, our YOYO cost us roughly: a secondhand chassis, two seat-and-canopy refreshes, and three accessory purchases. We have not added it all up against the cost of a new flagship stroller over the same window. The arithmetic is unkind to the flagship.

A note on the brand transition

The stroller we bought as a BABYZEN is sold today as the Stokke YOYO3. Stokke acquired BABYZEN years ago and the YOYO line now lives under the Stokke brand. What this means in practice: the chassis you might buy secondhand from a parent who bought a BABYZEN years ago is mechanically compatible with the current Stokke parts ecosystem. The brand transition did not break the modularity story; if anything it reinforced it. The parts still fit.

The one thing we would change

We are not pretending. Every stroller has a flaw, and the YOYO's, for our setup, is the bench-board for the older child.

When two children ride, with the youngest in the seat and the oldest standing on the bench-board behind, the geometry of an adult walking forward and a child standing on a low board behind them means feet kick the board with every step. There are workarounds. Shorten the strap. Change your stride. But the friction is real. Worth knowing if you plan to run a two-child stroller setup the way we do.

The split rule

Once we had both strollers, the rule emerged without us writing it down:

  • Thule Urban Glide for everything daily. New Zealand trails, shopping malls, the supermarket, the park, the long walks. Anywhere the YOYO's small wheels would slow us down. Anywhere we want to carry more than the YOYO's basket can hold. Anywhere comfort matters more than fold size. Most days, and almost everything in NZ.
  • YOYO reserved for flights and tight-space international travel. Anywhere checked stroller risk would ruin the trip. Anywhere city density makes the Urban Glide unwelcome. Anywhere we will be folding the stroller into a non-stroller-shaped space (a sushi bar, a small hotel room, an overhead bin).

Two strollers is not what the audit told us to buy. Two strollers is what the lives we were going to live actually required.

What this means if you are deciding

If you have one child, you do not travel internationally with the stroller, and you can absorb whatever stroller you buy across your daily use, any of the four on our original shortlist will serve you. Pick the one whose handle feels best in your hands and whose colour you can still look at in three years.

If you have a child and you fly with them, or you live across two cities, or you want the option to bring your stroller onto a plane without anxiety about handler damage, the YOYO earns its place as a second stroller. We would not make it our only stroller. We would not be without it.

If you have a newborn, you live somewhere with grass, gravel, hills, or weather, the Thule Urban Glide is the answer. (Current model is the Urban Glide 3, mechanically the same as the 2 with marginally better suspension.) The air-pumped tyres are the thing the comparison reviews undersell.

If you are going to have a second child within a few years, the YOYO is the only one in our shortlist where the chassis-now, seat-later economics make multi-child ownership genuinely cheaper than buying twice.

If you can stretch to both, we have not regretted it.

Stuff worth knowing if you decide to go YOYO

A note on links: Links below are OneLink-routed amzn.to short links that earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. We have used or would put on our own registry every item linked. Singapore and Australia visitors are routed to the appropriate local Amazon storefront; New Zealand visitors are routed to amazon.com.au where regional pricing applies. We are in the process of adding Shopee links for our Singapore and Malaysia readers. Until then, the Amazon links above will route you appropriately.

The current stroller

Replacement parts (the modularity story)

The accessories that earned their place

The other stroller

The shortlist we considered