Mothercare Spin

Mothercare Spin – I bought the spin a year ago. My baby is 10 months old. I looked at a lot of prams before choosing the spin. I liked the fact that you could easily change from forward to rear facing and that the carrycot turned into pushchair. The breaks starting sticking after a few months. The foam on the handle ripped. One day I put my baby in the pram and it collapsed, the chassis was broken, beyond repair. I rang mothercare who said to bring it in. I brought it in that day and they took one look and knew it couldn't be repaired. They told me to pick out another pram to that value as I didn't want the same one. There was no problem getting a replacement. I was very disappointed in the spin.

Breaks sticking. Chassis broke, foam on handle ripped.

A nearly perfect pram (does that exist??!) – I have used my Spin for nearly 12 months and have loved it. I spent a long time testing out pram options, umming and ahhing over the pros and cons of each one. For me my list of essential was 1. Easy to fold and store 2. A bassinet/seat combo rather than separate pieces 3. An adequate storage basket 4. Not too wide 4. Wanted it to look good

The Spin came out top of the class in my opinion, way infront of everything else I found.

It is sooooo simple to collapse, so easy to move about (I had horribly painful post-pregnancy carpel tunnel and tendonitis for 5 months after giving birth but still managed to push the pram relatively trouble free)

It's looks are simple and streamlined and as a result IMO is quite a beautiful looking thing,and most importantly (and obviously not something you can research beforehand) my daughter is very happy in it.

While the tires are solid so not as comfy a ride as the pumped up versions, the seat bracket set up enables a really lovely suspension type 'bounce' within the seat- perfect for manually rocking babes when stationary to sleep (I can vouch for this!) and cushioning them when going over kerbs or pavement lumps.

With the numerous recline options my daughter slept soundly in the pram up til about 6 months, but now she is bright eyed and alert to everything she loves to sit up and hold the bar and watch the world.

Living in sunny Perth the viewing panel at the top caused me a bit of grief for a short while as it seemed tricky to keep the sun off my daughter's head without a hat. That's until I started using the 'spin' feature. Previously I had only used the spin to change direction based on my desires (!) as I missed seeing my baby's smiling face when she faced the front so I sometimes turn her back to me (or if in a busy street where I felt her a little exposed in the early months)

However I now use the spin to simply deflect the sun and it's so wonderfully simple.The action takes a few seconds and hey presto! no sun on her head or her legs. Soon I will need to buy a double/inline pram to accommodate baby #2, and I will sorely miss the spin and the spin feature. Everything - Looks great, so easy to push, nice big basket, lovely big canopy, seems very comfy for the baby,price was good by comparison to other models (and I got mine in the Mothercare online sale so even better!) and completely reliable (my experience has been completely different to the first review- they have had a really duff one. I have had no issues at all with workmanship or quality, the brake sometimes sticks but it is no biggy at all for me, I just give the wheel a little nudge) Viewing panel could be improved with a velcro cover,and if they made a double version of this pram it'd be absolutely perfect!

Mothercare Spin – After much research we decided on the spin. We really wanted the bugaboo and perhaps we should have brought that. We have had to have the chassis replaced as the spring can out of the brake. It was good when in bassinet mood and when bub was little but now she is older it doesn't allow her to sit upright. She is consistently pulling herself forward. So now after only 11 months we have to buy another pram. The basket is not very big.

It is really light and easy to steer and we are now using the spin function but not as much as I thought we would. Light Doesn't allow toddler to sit upright. Brake spring broke after 3 months.

Excellent – We spent more time researching a pram than we did before we bought our car. This pram is great and we both love it. Although it was more expensive than what we were hoping to spend, it's been well worth it. Very easy to collapse, and although it still takes up quite a bit of room in the boot (we have a Mazda 3 hatch, it fits and any of the other comparable prams would have taken up much more room.

It's amazingly easy to manoeuvre - for AFL fans, its turning circle is more like Alwyn Davey than Scott Lucas. There's no annoying bar between the back wheels to kick when you walk. And it handles most terrain with ease. I imagine a 3-wheeler would be better off-road, but how much off-roading will you actually be doing?

The rubberised tires are great and they're not pneumatic, so you don't have to worry about punctures. The canopy has a mesh insert for air flow, which is rare to see in prams and great in the Australian summer.

What could be better? Well, it could come with a sunshade. But that's pretty minor. Our baby is quite squirmy and sometimes ends up at the bottom end of the bassinet, but she doesn't seem to mind and has had some great sleeps in there.

All in all, we love it. A great choice. Compact, easy to collapse, really easy to manoeuvre, many different positions, comes with almost all you need. In bassinet mode, baby sometimes ends up sliding to the bottom, but that could just be our squirmy baby.

All that glitters is not gold – Finding the right stroller is a difficult task. They're either too wide, too unstable, inflexible, heavy, pricey, uncomfortable to the baby, difficult to steer or, I'm told, ugly. The Mothercare Spin seemed to best match our desires and we were particularly impressed with its ease of folding, weight and steering. The price was also a welcome surprise.

After owning the stroller for a couple of weeks, it developed an intermittent problem with the brake whereby it would either refuse to engage or disengage. The mechanism was obviously faulty so we returned it for repair. Mothercare, through gritted teeth, provided a loan base chassis while they repaired ours.

The loan chassis also developed the same issue. Complaints to the company were met with claims that we were the only people with said issue and it was implied that we could not work the brake correctly. One would hope that brake application was not a complicated process.

Unfortunately the base unit could not be repaired so we were given a replacement. This was a welcome offering which we gladly accepted.

In the store, the clerk chirpily demonstrated the new chassis' brake. All worked as expected however, and we should have been more assertive at the time, the folding mechanism was problematic. We were told that this sometimes happened with a new unit and it would ease very quickly with use. More fool us.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I return home to a panda-eyed, sleep deprived mother who was unable to collapse the stroller at the local shopping centre. She had tried for over twenty minutes before giving up and placing it, fully extended, into the passenger seat of the car. I tried to collapse it and realised that the thing was pretty much ceased.

Another call to Mothercare and, patiently sitting through their patronising attempts to blame us for not being able to use the stroller, I suggested that it was unfit for purpose and expected a store credit which was readily accepted.

We returned the stroller, accepted the credit and purchased an alternate product. The stroller we wanted had to be ordered in (which was no problem -- they were very helpful on this process) and we planned to pick it up the following weekend. This is where it got interesting and our self doubt was eliminated.

The store had a temporary staff member who, under cover of stroller demonstration, admitted that the Spin's were nothing but trouble and they had been receiving a large volume of returns for the two reasons we had experienced -- brakes and ceased collapsing mechanisms. We weren't the imbeciles we had been lead to believe but instead amongst many equally unhappy customers.

Whilst some people may well get lucky and receive a Spin that works as expected, it sounds like there are plenty more who will not. There are obviously some shortcomings with the design and manufacture process and I would strongly recommend people consider this as part of their purchase decision. Reasonably priced, nifty spin feature, good weight, easy to manouver Product quality.