Last year I discovered that we have a fantastic local business right on our doorstep in Cottingham, LIFERYDER, making awesome kids off-road scooters! We were lucky enough to be invited ‘inside the factory’ to see them being made last year and chose one for each of my children.
LIFERYDER has been set up by two local dads with the mission of making the best scooters they could for their children. They already had an engineering business and the skills to make the scooters, so during the Covid-19 pandemic they have spent their time refining the scooters and setting up a factory so they can all be made here in Cottingham. Here we are last year watching parts be made and the final scooter packaged ready to post out.
The scooters are very robust and can be used for normal scooting or to go off-road. They’re suitable for up to 50kg weight (but they reassures me I could go on it and not do any damage!). The scooters are all based on the same design, which adjusts to your child’s height, but you customise it by choosing the design. The designs are stickers, which means if your child changes their mind or wants a new design you can replace them with a new set at any point. There are over 30 designs to choose from (many created by Chris and Allan’s children), you can choose on their website here.
We collected our boxes and then you assemble the scooter together at home. For me this was a great extra – my kids love building things (usually Lego or some mechano) so this was a novelty build! It also really shows the children how things work, how pieces go together, another engineering lesson for us. As soon as we got home my children put them together, dad wanted to get involved in this bit! Instructions were very clear and easy to follow. My husband said he was really impressed with how well made it all was, how easily it went together and how much he enjoyed doing it with the kids. The scooters do fold in half to transport to places, you just need to remove one bolt (they didn’t design them to fold like a normal scooter with the clip down mechanism as this didn’t make the scooters strong enough).
A year on and I went back to the factory in May 2021 to see what has changed; it looks very different! It is now fully scaled up for production and there were a lot of scooter parts and finished scooters to see. The stickers on the scooters can be replaced so I chose new sets for my children – my daughter has a birthday this month so I chose a more ‘grown-up’ looking set for her as a present, and not to leave my son out, he is now Fortnite obsessed so I chose him their Fortnite set.
We have had a fantastic year out and about on our LifeRyders, they are great just to go on the pavement and come home from school on, but they are fantastic to use on walks that have some off road patches like bridal paths and tracks. They’re so versatile! We have taken them to the beach, on holiday, pretty much everywhere we go the LifeRyder’s come too and they’ve really helped us get on longer walks and trips out, especially over lockdown.
If you would like a LIFERYDER scooter you can order them from their website here or email [email protected] for more info. They can be posted out across the UK or you can collect direct from the factory in Cottingham to save the postage cost (collection is available every Friday).
