Those Baby Blues: It's Color of Choice For the Stroller Set

Here's the gist of this WSJ article. See Curiosities for details explaing why the March 25, 1998 article itself doesn't appear here.

• Most strollers, prams and baby buggies are navy blue.
• Strollers in Italy are brighter; so are strollers in Germany.
• A US marketing director for Combi confirms that, for the US market, navy blue is the answer. so does a manager for Brio.
• Navy blue makes Americans think of the European tradition.
• But the preference for navy blue might have to do with gender.
• Americans don't want to wheel their boys in girl's colors
• Sales of all-terrain and jogging strollers were up the previous year.
• Sales of traditional strollers remained steady or declined.
• Manufacturers wish they could boost sales by selling design.
• Exotic colors and patterns haven't worked out at Lullaby Lane.
• Regalo tried green, an allegedly hot color. It didn't sell.
• A color consultant says that the manufacturere should have looked to hot colors in cars.
  [Note: we hope she got a consulting fee from the WSJ for sharing this tidbit. She does make her living doing this, after all.]
  [Oh, wait a minute -- maybe it was a freebie, since she knew she'd get some unexpected exposure! Now we get it!!]
• New jogging strollers and cheap strollers are now being made in bright prints.
• Fisher-Price won't be jumping on the bright colors bandwagon. Neither will KidCo (former distributor of Mclaren).

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot more amusing in the orignal. But you don't get to find out how clever the WSJ middle column can be since the WSJ wants our money more than our goodwill. (And we didn't think anybody was smarter than the WSJ. Well, you learn something new . . . )