No Ups & Downs With The Babyzen YOYO Pushchair

This is the best Yoyo I have ever played with…and I include in that those Coca-Cola ones that everyone at my school had in the early 1990s!

Far too early (!) I started looking into a smaller foldable pushchair to go with our UPPAbaby VISTA. This wasn’t a purchase I was planning to make until baby M was at least 6 months old or until we got closer to the summer holidays.

From looking around it appeared that we would need to spend around £200-£250 to get a decent lightweight folding stroller. You can get one for about £30 in Tesco I saw the other day, but that comes ‘lovingly’ packaged in just some clear polythene and looks about as reliable as a monkey being left to guard a bowl of fruit.

The VISTA with its seat unit will last us at least the first 3 years, but that is the ‘family car’ pram system – the one we use for the longer days out or the longer walks around town where the massive shopping basket comes into its own (among many other features). It’s that smaller lightweight buggy that I knew I wanted…and when I stumbled across the Babyzen YOYO I instantly knew that I had to have one.

Like Gollum craving a golden ring I wants, I needs it!

So I gots it…

It cost the best part of £400 for the from birth package, and I could have got just the 6 months plus version for around the £260 mark (and waited another 4 months at the time), but there were trips planned already where this would prove to be easier to manage than the VISTA so I dove in.

As well as the VISTA the YOYO has proved to be one of the best purchases I have made.

I bought mine online from Whitestep, and it was a moment of excitement when I got home to find it waiting for me in the hallway.

I unpacked it all and had a good look over to check all was there (and it was) and then spent the rest of the evening resisting the urge to start building it and playing with it. It went to the office with me next day where I gave it the full and uundivided attention it deserved.

Inside the Whitestep outer box lived a little family of smaller boxes…

3 of them were for later use, for the 6+ conversion. So I stayed focussed on the newborn version. The actual pushchair chassis came in the box on the left and was neatly packed inside a protective bag which I didn’t realise was included, but is!

The newborn nest box had the fabrics required to make the lie-flat base for baby, as well as a protective head ‘cushion’ and the raincover.

Unfolding the chassis took a few minutes to work out and I initially thought it was overly complicated, but that was because I was disbelieving of how easy it is to unfold so was looking for complications that just aren’t there.

This buggy has the coolest unfold I have ever seen and you can do it one-handed and flick it out and it clicks together in mid-air like a Transformer! If only it had the Transformer sound effect when you do this…

Applying the fabrics to create the newborn nest was ever so slightly fiddly, but easy enough to do by following the manual. It needs a few minutes of concentration to get it done, but the end result looks great.

I then spent the next 10 minutes just admiring it, from all angles.

The white-wall wheels, the curves of the frame, the subtle and classy branding…it all works together in beautifully designed harmony and is actually the smoothest buggy I have ever had the pleasure of pushing. Not sure what they have done to the wheels to make it so smoothe but it is incredible.

It has since been tested on a few different urban surfaces such as pavements and cobbles and roads and has worked great each time. It’s not one for sand, but everything else seems fair game.

Now, I raved about the unfold – the effort to fold it back up is minimal as it is also very easy. I was really pleased to see that the folded pushchair with the newborn fabrics on also fits back inside the protective bag so this is where it lives now and it stays in there when we go out anywhere until it needs to be used. The design of the protective bag leaves the shoulder strap of the buggy on the outside so you can carry the buggy over your shoulder in or out of the protective bag.

Yes, let me not skip over that point about carrying it on your shoulder. This pushchair is super light, weighing in at around 5kgs which is probably lighter than your baby anytime after about 2 or 3 months old. You can carry this newborn pushchair around on your shoulder!!

It actually folds down so small and weighs so little that you can carry it on board pretty much any aeroplane as hand luggage!!!

This was another reason why I knew that the YOYO was the right product. There is a small holiday booked for later this year that will involve us all being on a plane. I have heard too many horror stories of pushchairs getting damaged while stored in the hold and the extra comfort of being able to wheel baby M to the gate and then put her straight back in when we land is very appealing and had a value. Can’t imagine what it must be like to arrive at your holiday destination and find out you have no pushchair!

The other great bonus of having something that small for your baby is the amount of boot space you get to reclaim when you are going out in the car. Most from-birth pram systems take up at least half of the boot by the time you have put the chassis and the carrycot unit in there. Here’s how much boot space the YOYO takes up in our Skoda Yeti:

It’s amazing!

Baby M enjoys being in the YOYO too, which is obviously the make or break part of our enjoyment of a product, and she managed to have a good snooze in there during a few restaurant visits around Christmas time. The smoothe ride means that she likes it when she is awake and being pushed around.

I have noticed one extra handy use of the YOYO while we have been out and about. Because the area where M lies flat is not closed off at the end you can actually use the YOYO as a nappy changing station!

This is excellent for those few occasions where a change is required and you are nowhere near a suitable place to do it, or when you wheel the pushchair into a baby change area to find it looking like something a group of drunken teenagers have trashed and then copulated in!

The handlebars fold out to a reasonable height and I have never felt awkward or uncomfortable walking with it or using it, and the brake is very easy to operate.

I spent the first few times looking for a problem with it as it was just all too good to be true, but I really can’t find anything that stops me from doing anything other than looking forward to using it each time.

If I was to be hyper-critical then I would say that the basket is just a touch on the small side…but then it is a pushchair that folds down small enough to be carried onto a plane, so if course it has a smallish basket. That said, it’s an OK size, I have just been a bit spoiled with the size of the UPPAbaby basket and you can fit an average sized changing bag in it.

Babyzen did actually launch the new and improved Babyzen YOYO+ last month and from reading about it they have increased the basket size by another 60%, so it will actually have a whopper hanging underneath it now!

I was really pleased to see that the YOYO won the Gold Award at the Mother & Baby Awards in December in the best lightweight pushchair category. I think it is thoroughly deserved, and I see that the YOYO+ has already started to pick up some plaudits including a 5 star review from Pushchair Expert.

I am sure that this brand and this range of YOYO pushchairs will go from strength to strength here in the UK over the next 12 months and that deserves to be the case.

I am a big fan of great design, and to the 5 gents in France who came up with this truly and genuinely remarkable pushchair I raise a glass to you…formidable!

I’ll report back later this year when we have been using the YOYO as a 6+ pushchair, but for now it is a highly recommended product.

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NB: I have not been paid or asked to write this review. I bought our YOYO from Whitestep and love it so much that I want to tell everyone about it that will listen!