On Gmarket, one of South Korea’s largest online retailers, pet strollers made up 57 percent of all strollers sold in the first three quarters of 2023, against 43 percent for baby strollers. It was the first time on the platform that carriages for pets outsold the ones for babies.
The easy version of this story writes itself: Koreans are swapping babies for dogs. The truer version is messier, because it’s really two separate trends that happened to cross on one line of a sales chart.
It’s worth being precise about what Gmarket actually said. The pet share climbed from 33 percent in 2021 to 36 percent in 2022 to 57 percent in 2023. The baby share fell from 67 to 64 to 43 over the same window. The pet share jumped more than 20 points in a single year.
One caveat: the 57/43 figure covers the first three quarters of the year, not the full twelve months. It’s a real crossover, just a narrower window than the round headline can imply.
The baby side of the ledger
Fewer baby strollers is the expected half. South Korea’s fertility rate, the average number of children a woman would be expected to have over her lifetime if that year’s age-specific rates continued, fell to 0.72 in 2023, down from 0.78 in 2022. That was the world’s lowest rate that year, far below the roughly 2.1 replacement level in a population without migration. In Seoul the rate was lower still: 0.55 in 2023, the lowest of any region in the country.
Korea reported 230,000 births in 2023, 19,200 fewer than the year before, a 7.7 percent decrease. Fewer babies born means fewer families in the market for a baby stroller.
A quick note on where we’re standing. We’re not demographers or economists, and this is reading and reflection on the reporting, not a diagnosis of why a country stopped having children. The population figures are national statistics; almost everything downstream of them is contested.
The pet side, and what a stroller signals
The other half is a pet economy that has been growing fast. The agriculture ministry put the sector at 8 trillion won in 2022, while the government set a target of 15 trillion won by 2027. The ministry also counted about 6.02 million households raising dogs or cats in 2022.
However, for a healthy pet, a stroller is usually a discretionary purchase and can signal the shift analysts describe as pet humanization or pet parenting.
Dog-stroller sales have quadrupled since 2019, while a top-end Airbuggy model was priced around $1,100. Yoon Hyun-shin, head of Pet Friends, said: “Pet ownership is rising, and so is spending on pets as people choose them over children.” That’s an industry executive’s interpretation, and the claim that people are choosing pets over children is exactly the part that deserves caution. It may be true for some households. It’s an assertion, not a measured fact.
What the crossover proves, and what it doesn’t
It is tempting to read the stroller figure as a country swapping dogs for babies, one for one. Kim Moon-soo, South Korea’s labor minister, said in 2023: “What I worry about is young people not loving each other. Instead, they love their dogs and carry them around,” adding that young people were not marrying or having children.
What the figure actually shows is two numbers moving in opposite directions. The baby side is shrinking because there are fewer babies. The pet side is growing alongside rising pet ownership and spending. A ratio can flip when both halves move, without either half telling you that one caused the other.
The data do not show that people buying a dog stroller are people who would otherwise have had a child. Many young adults cite housing, education and child-rearing costs among their reasons for delaying or forgoing children, but sharing a backdrop is not the same as one thing driving the other.
A Korea story, or a preview
So is this uniquely Korean? Partly.
South Korea had the world’s lowest fertility rate in 2023 and a fast-growing pet market, a combination that made the crossover arrive early and land hard. But later marriage, high housing and education costs, and greater spending on pets aren’t confined to one country.
Our read is that the stroller number is a good marker and a poor cause. It won’t explain why South Korea’s fertility rate collapsed, and it certainly didn’t cause it. What it does is make an abstract trend physically visible: on one sales chart, the carriages built for pets quietly pulled ahead of the ones built for babies.
