I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of the Svan chair. A lot of people like it's swoopy, um, Swan-like curves, but it just looks kind of overdesigned to me. All those platforms and angles.
[And not just me; in the last week, two people who bought Svans at Amazon through the daddytypes links have returned them. No idea who they are, or why they returned them--maybe Grandmas already surprised them with Svans, who knows--but it's an odd coincidence. Of course, it's a coincidence that knocked $30 off my Amazon associates revenue, now the kid's gonna have to poledance her way through a state school, but hey, what's important here is that people are satisfied with their purchases. Customer service will be a valuable life lesson for my little burger flipper. But where was I? Right, Svan.]
So that's why I was a little surprised when I got the press release for the Svan Scooter, because it's one of the sweetest scooter-like toys I think I've ever seen. It is so spare, it's barely there at all. The elegant shape is a single piece of wood, bent into a 3-d representation of a dot-com stock price graph circa early 2000 [talk about poignant life lessons...]. It rolls around on little casters and doesn't have handles, so it's pretty much an indoor affair, but still. It looks like cash money. $119, to be exact, available November 1st.
The Svan Scooter [svanchair.com]
Svan Scooter on Amazon [not really, it's a third-party seller/order-taker right now]
Buy other Svan gear at Amazon [but only if you want to keep it, you understand]
Scooter? this is more like a scrap of wood on furniture casters! What ever happened to basic affordances like handles? What, do hip babies not need them? If this is somebody's idea of a good scooter, perhaps they should just buy an IKEA magazine rack and slap the seat on some wrong way.
Hey wait a minute, if I put some casters on my offi chairtable, I've got practically the same thing! score! but i'm too much of a design ho to do that to my offi.
remember what happened to skateboards when people started using those tiny wheels.
I guess I was being a tad harsh: if there were a handlebar (chrome) and some real wheels, the idea of a bent ply scooter is quite sweet.
...I think with chome handlebars it might look a bit like a kiddie Lark, sans saftey flag and grocery bin.
Also, don't most three wheeled things with high COG tip over at the slightest nudge? Perhaps that's why they left the "chopper bars" off (LOL).
What I want to know is (everyone now): "Where's the cup holder???"
[the sippy cup holder, that is. I'd just bore out a cup-sized hole right in the top where the handlebars aren't. -ed.]