Dad’s Workout Leads to Successful Business : Some Joggers Take the Baby Along

In the booming business of equipping the baby boomers, a company that makes baby strollers for joggers is a runaway success.

The children of Prince Charles and Princess Di, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, and Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover girl Kim Alexis all have one of Phil Baechler’s Baby Jogger strollers.

Baechler, a 39-year-old former newspaperman, invented the lightweight, three-wheeled stroller five years ago because the avid runner hated to leave his son Travis at home during workouts.

The solution was to take him along in the aluminum-framed cart fitted with nylon seats and 20-inch bicycle wheels.

“Our customers are affluent, the prototype yuppies,” said Mary Baechler, 31, the inventor’s wife and president of Racing Strollers Inc.

The strollers allow customers to combine the yuppie passions for fitness and family, she said.

“You have couples that ran before and then kids came along and that put a damper on exercise,” she said.

The strollers are handmade at a modest garage-turned-shop. Despite a price of $240 per stroller, or $320 for one that holds twins, sales for the once-struggling company are doubling each year, she said.

The strollers are available only through mail-order advertisements in running magazines, and at a few specialized sporting goods stores, Baechler said.

Even so, the 12-employee company is hard-pressed to meet demand.

After selling just 113 strollers in 1984, sales will top 2,700, with gross revenues of $500,000, this year, he said.

Most sales are by word-of-mouth, although the strollers regularly get free publicity when they are used as props in athletic clothing catalogues.

Baechler quit his job as news editor of the Yakima Herald-Republic last year to work full-time as marketing director for the company.

Their most noted customer may have been industrialist Armand Hammer, who purchased a stroller as a gift for Prince Harry, the son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

Hammer’s office sent Baechler a copy of a letter in which Charles thanked Hammer for the “splendid child’s jogging cart which you so kindly sent us for Harry. At the moment William (their other son) thinks it is much more fun than Harry does.”

Baechler built himself the first Baby Jogger in 1983, attaching bicycle wheels to the frame of a conventional stroller. After using it during a 10-kilometer race in Yakima, people approached him about buying one, and the company was born.

Sales were slow at first, as the neophyte entrepreneurs learned business the hard way. Parts were hard to find, they had to pay cash for everything, and Baechler would come home from the night shift at the paper and stay up for hours building strollers for running families.

Now the work is done in a large garage that is a jumble of aluminum tubing, spoked wheels, rubber tires, brake assemblies and nylon canvas seats. Strollers are made eight at a time, with the tubes shaped by hand.

Although there have been some discussions with major retailers, the Baechlers say they are not ready to handle a major order from a department store or retail chain.

“We’re still a custom-made, hand-built, U.S.A. item,” he said.