That's also roughly how it went for the high-end supercool baby stores, according to Daniel Kron, who with his wife, Geane Brito, is owner of Genius Jones. At the time they decided to open their South Beach, Miami, store, in 2003, he was an entrepreneur who had just lost his shirt on an Internet company and simultaneously gained a son. "It's such a cliche to say you couldn't find any well-designed products," Kron says. "The difference with me is, I did find the stuff."

He was one of the first to make a deal to sell the now-ubiquitous strollers by the Dutch firm Bugaboo, which for people who aren't parents are the ones that resemble something astronauts took to the surface of the moon during the Appolo program, only they come in brighter colors, and maybe cost more. Now Kron carries the mini Mies chair, which comes in black or white and is two-thirds the size of an actual Mies, though not quite two-thirds the price, at around $4,000.

Genius Jones also sells the work of David Netto, children's furniture designer extraordinaire. "Growing up, I certainly didn't have a revolting child's room," Netto says. This was pre-late seventies, just before the world's plastic industry focused itself on crap for the kids. "The dumbing down of children's things arrived later," Netto says.