In the Upper East and West Sides, the West Village, and Brooklyn Heights – some of the New York City neighborhoods where well-off new parents reside – Bugaboo strollers are pervasive. Our sidewalks are congested with bug-eyed sunglassed moms and Lacosted dads pushing these all-terrain vehicles from one shop to another. These stroller drivers are edgier and hipper than the parents I remember as a child. Perhaps edgy style is an accepted norm for the parents of New York City, but it seems these strollers have empowered their parents to retain the avant-garde fashion that typically fades when the first children come.

Bugaboos command $500 premiums over other non-urban assault strollers. The Bugaboo and the other new entrants into the "status stroller" market earn these premiums because they feed their drivers' ability to self-express. While there is an increased utility in these lighter, more rugged strollers, how Bugaboo owners believe their image is defined by the stroller makes the purchase pattern a phenomenon. This "status stroller" enables self-expressive signaling for both socio-economic status and other more intricate nuances of outward identity. The Bugaboo says "I have made it," but it also says "I am young, urban, adventurous, and athletic – being a parent hasn't slowed me down." The irony of the "status stroller" phenomenon is that not only do the "vehicles" carry the children (status icons in their own right), but the burden of cueing the upwardly mobile parents' success.

The transformation of the mature stroller category into an explosive new market was no fluke. The Bugaboo became a transformative, self-expressive phenomenon because its design is wholly unexpected. Euro-styling and ruggedness were completely unanticipated product attributes in a category originally defined by basic utility. It used to be that a stroller only had to be lightweight and compact to be successful. By flipping the category's expectations, Bugaboo created cognitive dissonance for the product's observers between their expectations for the product category and their perception of the product's actual form. Cognitive dissonance, in this sense, is the opposition between the product observer expectations for product categories or brands and the reality of the product's actual design – and the act of mentally rectifying these two countervailing forces.

Dissonant designs such as the Bugaboo turn owners into evangelists who publicly rationalize their investment in these unexpected products while building their identities as trendsetters. In other words, the Bugaboo owner will convince you to buy a Bugaboo ostensibly because she loves how it works, but really because she wants you to know she is forward-thinking. By convincing her friends to follow her lead, she feels the emotional benefit of having converted others based on her foresight.