Balance Bike Packaging: How much is too much?

Some bikes are wrapped in so much bubble wrap, foam, masking tape, zip ties, plastic, and cardboard to choke a hungry goat! We're not sure what this says about the durability of the finish of these bikes, or of the hardness of the components. That is to say, if all the parts that make up a bike are hard enough and sharp enough to damage each other and need protection, how much damage will they potentially give your child? So- a defect-prone fragile finish needs to be protected from itself during shipping. What about the kids? Should we protect them with bubble wrap every time they ride one of these bikes?

The FUJI Rookie was a good quality balance bike, now discontinued. Packaging was adequate.

 What we have found over the years is that the higher quality bikes by LikeaBIKE and FirstBIKE use minimal packaging for their bikes. There is nary a piece of plastic to be found- just a cupped piece of cardboard separating the front wheel from the frame. Models like the LikeaBIKE Mountain and the LikeaBIKE Forest come out of the box with both wheels attached and the handlebar loose- wrapped in tissue paper!. The FirstBIKE comes out of the box with only a piece of cardboard. You simply attach the frame to the fork and install the wheel. The only plastic packaging is the pouch that holds the instructions/tools in it. We like the minimalist packaging because it proves that the quality of the materials is at least as durable to withstand some gentle rubbing against the inside of a cardboard box, as it should be!

FirstBIKE vs Strider Comparison Chart

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FUJI Rookie Balance Bike

White bikes always look high-end in our humble opinion.

We are big fans of FUJI Rookie balance bike for a few reasons:

• Aluminum frame
• Premium brand name
• Free bell!
• Big comfortable shock dampening pneumatic tires
• one color- pearl white- isn't gender specific and makes buying decision easy
• Each bike has a serial number, just like every other Fuji Bike

If your price point is around $100, we encourage you to give the Fuji Rookie your serious consideration. For about $40 more you get some high end features and benefits found on bike costing 2-3x more.

UPDATE: The FUJI Rookie has been discontinued at the end of 2011. FUJI did not really make much of a marketing effort and bike shops were reluctant to stock a balance bike that comes in only one [sterile-looking] color.

Balance bikes with foot rests: hot or not?

We're not crazy about foot rests on balance bikes. Children learn to balance more successfully when they put their feet down as stabilizers whenever they need to. This instills confidence and puts them in control of [not] falling down. This is also partly why [for tots] a bike with pedals needs to have training wheels- because the pedals are in the way of using their feet for stability. So it stands to reason that giving kids a platform to rest their feet is counter-productive, though we recognize it as a feature that pays dividends when kids are rolling down looooong gradual hills (which hopefully aren't steep and which do not cross other streets!) Even so, foot pegs welded to a balance bike's frame defeat the purpose of removing the pedals in the first place- which is to get them out of the way and uncomplicate the learning process!

We have also observed that certain brands of balance bike which feature a foot rest can potentially injure a child because as children push off the ground to gain speed, sometimes their feet hit and get tangled with the foot rests. This is not so much a problem with the wildly popular KaZaM as it is with others on the market which have a welded tube added underneath the frame.

Bottom line: Foot rests are not a deal maker or breaker when it comes to balance bikes. Top of the line LikeaBIKEs do not even offer them here in the US. Neither do the all-new FirstBIKE or the FUJI Rookie. It's just a gimmicky feature that doesn't add any real value to the learning process and which could potentially cause a lot of painful bruises on a child's ankles.