With the beautiful parks and landscape of our growing city, the pathways are always being utilized by residents going for a jog or a nightly stroll. But what happens when it’s -30 and the pathways and sidewalks are packed with snow and ice? It can make going for that desired walk very treacherous. Now….add into the mix pushing a stroller through the ice and snow and you’ve got quite the predicament. But thanks to a creative invention, those winter walks with a little one in a stroller just got easier.
Polar Stroller is a husband and wife team, who moved to Calgary from Yorkshire, England in 2009. Being avid outdoors people and living on the ridge of Fish Creek Park mean that walking, hiking, cycling, snowboarding, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing have become a way of life for them. However, these activities became a little harder after having their first child. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy pushing a stroller through snow, but didn’t appreciate how difficult it would be. In the deep snow my stroller would sink and stop and on the compacted pathways it would bounce around.”
“My husband first came up with this idea back in Nov 2013, when we had our first large dump of snow. We had bought a good all-terrain stroller, which was meant to be good in the snow, however not the amount of snow we experience here. I couldn’t get my stroller over the lumps and bumps and it would sink and stop in the deeper snow, making it impossible to get out for my daily walks. On the hard compressed pathways the ride was so bumpy for my 2 month old baby I was concerned about the amount he was getting shaken about and it would spill my much needed coffee everywhere!” said Kelly. The couple’s first child, Owen, is now two and the couple is expecting baby number two in the spring.
Kelly went on to explain that as her son, Owen, was not a sleeper, the only way he would sleep was on the move in his stroller. “From being two days old I would lay him flat in his stroller and take him for a walk morning and afternoon. It was also great for assisting with my physical recovery, fitness and mental well-being! It is a proven fact that outdoor exercise helps keep post-partum depression away, it defiantly helped me. Then the snow fell and I was house bound with my 2 month old, that wouldn’t sleep. So I challenged my husband, a design engineer, to find a solution… Happy wife = Happy life!”
The first step was that her husband looked all over the internet to buy skis for the stroller. “He thought in this country they must exist, but no… we could not find anyone who made them. So he began designing and being avid winter sports people, skis were his first idea, but how to attach and release them was the issue. When you have a baby crying you need to get on the go as fast as possible, so the attachment mechanism had to be quick and strong. After several prototypes he came up with an idea which worked great. We used it every day, twice a day for 3 months, I love the outdoors and was so relieved to be able to do my daily walks again. Everywhere we went people would stop us and ask, “Where did you get those skis from? What a great idea, you should go on dragons den”. Well we thought about it and looked into it and decided to found Polar Stroller”.
It took her husband under a week to design and make the first prototype that they tried for a few weeks then made a couple of minor changes and away they went with version 1. “The first version had a large white strap which went around the outside of the wheel, this worked great, but he was constantly thinking of new designs to feed through the wheel, opposed to going around the outside of the wheel”.
“October 2014 we launched our 2015 Polar Stroller ski with new anchor strap, which when through the wheel and was a tool less adjustment system for the bindings. There are not many parents, who have tools to hand when needing to change the setup of the wheel binding. We wanted to make it easy to interchange the skis between strollers, as many parents have two strollers”, said Kelly.
“This summer we have been working on our new design for 2016, which we have just launched. My husband has designed all the components of the binding, anchor straps and safety leash. We have all the components made for us and then we assemble all the skis and perform QC checks. We stress and test our product thoroughly and use high quality materials that are made to withstand the freezing temperatures and are fit for the purpose which they are being used for”.
Kelly goes on to say, “There is nothing more frustrating as a consumer than buying a product and then it not doing what it is supposed to do or breaking. We pride ourselves on high quality and excellent customer service, which is one of the reasons we only sell direct to the consumer. Being a small family business, husband and wife team, we run all aspects of our business and do so with much pride and passion. It brings great joy to us to see other families using our stroller skis and enjoying the great outdoors. I love getting thank you letters from customers and telling us how we have changed their life, saved their sanity etc. We even get thank you letters from people’s dogs, as now they can enjoy nice walks as a family again. We love our stroller skis and want to share how much joy they bring us, with other like-minded parents. I now look forward to the snow falling and LOVE my winter walks in this winter wonderland”.
This seems to be something that could work for a number of other pieces of equipment. When asked about what was next for this creative team, Kelly commented, “there are many fields we are looking into for the future, however there are also lots of limiting factors, such as wheel alignment; do the wheels have the ability to lock; or do they swivel; are they solid; how will the person driving the chair or wagon control it on hills. Wheel chairs are much heavier than strollers, especially if there is an adult in it. We have been asked if our skis would work with walking frames; children’s bikes and bike attachments. Our Stroller skis are compatible with special needs strollers and we do custom orders for those that are unusual. We sell our stroller skis for pet strollers too”.
“We love to enjoy winter walking, snow shoe trails, visit the ski hills and dog parks with friends. All of which we can now do with our stroller skis.” To learn more about this creative invention, you can visit www.polarstroller.com
