Review: Woom Bike Helmet

This review is for the updated 2022 Woom Bike Helmet, which I recently purchased for my child. You can see a comparison to some other bike helmets we own on this post here.

The Woom bike helmet is quite simply the most innovative kids’ helmet I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. Woom have taken classic helmet design and made some bold and clever changes to make their helmet extremely practical for use in the real world. A world in which kids put their own helmets on, straps slip and get tangled, and children fall over.

Here’s a short video showcasing the 2022 Woom helmet, and my favourite features:

Woom Helmet Top Features

Best-in-class head coverage: The Woom helmet extends really far from front to back, making it hard for it to slide back on the child’s head, because it already covers as far as the nape of the neck. It also has great coverage around the ears and temple at the front.
Untangle-able straps: Rather than the usual adjustable nylon webbing, the Woom helmet has a fixed cord strap under each ear. A short webbing chin-strap is fixed onto this. This set up makes it really clear which strap is which, and very hard to get tangled.
Easy to access tightness adjuster: The large accessible dial means you can still easily tighten or loosen the helmet when it is on the child’s head.
Flexible and robust attached visor: the visor is part of the helmet and is strong but slightly flexible to absorb shocks. Watch the video to see how this works.
Adjustable pads: the helmet comes with two sets of internal pads, 3mm and 6mm, for a perfect custom fit.

Woom Helmet – Reasons you might not want to buy it

The Woom helmet is fantastic, but it is not going to be right for everyone. Here are some reasons you might decide not to purchase one:

• Price: The Woom is quite an expensive helmet, more than I would usually choose to spend. I prefer not to buy high-end kids’ helmets, because they do get knocked about more than adult helmets and I typically replace them every two years. I feel that the price is justified in this case, because it is a big step up in functionality (and therefore safety) from other helmets we have used.
• Style: This comes down to personal preference, but I don’t love the skater-style look of the Woom, or the straight rows of air vents.
• Chin strap pad: For our child, the chin-strap comfort pad is quite wide, and means we struggle to get the helmet tight enough under the chin, there is no wiggle room left around the pad. This could be resolved by having shorter under-ear straps, or a smaller chin comfort pad. It’s easier to explain in this video. The wide chin-strap pad does also sometimes get in the way of doing up the magnetic buckle.

Woom Helmet Sizing

The Woom helmet comes in much tighter sizing bands than other helmets, with little overlap. The sizes are XS (46-50cm), S (50-53cm) and M (53cm-56cm). This enables them to offer fantastic head coverage because the helmet shape can be tailored more. However, we found it tricky because our child’s head size was pretty much exactly 53cm, and we weren’t sure which size to go for. The guidance from Woom suggested sizing down at the boundary, so we purchased a Small. We needed to use the thinner 3mm pads around the side of our child’s head to stop it being too snug, but it is an excellent fit.