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The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute
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About The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion And The
Product Description A bestselling journalist delivers the never-before-told story of the plush animal craze that became the tulip mania of the 1990s In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. In just three years, collectors who saw the toys as a means of speculation made creator Ty Warner, an eccentric college dropout, a billionaire--without advertising or big-box distribution. Beanie Babies were ten percent of eBay's sales in its early days, with an average selling price of $30--six times the retail price. At the peak of the bubble in 1999, Warner reported a personal income of $662 million--more than Hasbro and Mattel combined. The end of the craze was swift and devastating, with "rare" Beanie Babies deemed worthless as quickly as they'd once been deemed priceless. Bissonnette draws on hundreds of interviews (including a visit to a man who lives with his 40,000 Ty products and an in-prison interview with a guy who killed a coworker over a Beanie Baby debt) for the first book on the strangest speculative mania of all time. Review "A fresh and darkly comic look at how the rise of internet commerce went hand-in-hand with soccer moms and "irrational exuberance" to transform a cheap children's toy into a national mania and one of the greatest speculative bubbles in American history. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble will leave you shaking your head and wistfully remembering the wild, wild ride that was the late 1990s. " -- TILAR MAZZEO, author of The Widow Cliquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It About the Author Zac Bissonnette wrote two acclaimed bestsellers before his twenty-fourth birthday: Debt-Free U and How to Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents. He has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe Magazine, the Daily Beast, and Bloomberg, among others. He lives in New York City. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION The greatest toy salesman in the world looked out at his 250 employees gathered for the Ty Inc. holiday party. “Wow!” fifty-four-year-old Ty Warner said. “I’ve never been in a room with so many millionaires!” The salespeople cheered because it wasn’t an exaggeration. It was December 12, 1998, and Ty Inc. was three weeks away from closing out a year of sales that would break nearly every record in the annals of the toy industry. Andi Van Guilder was seated in the back with the relatives she’d hired to answer the phones that hadn’t stopped ringing with orders for Beanie Babies in close to three years. She thought about it. In 1993, she’d made less than $30,000 lugging trunks of porcelain figurines and collector plates to stores in two states. In 1998, selling Beanie Babies to independently owned toy and gift shops in Chicago’s northern suburbs had paid her more than $800,000 in commissions. She was thirty years old. Life was perfect. The applause died down. Ty made the announcement he’d been planning for weeks: he would be giving all his employees Christmas bonuses equal to their annual salaries. Pandemonium ensued. “Ty was their God,” Faith McGowan, Ty’s then girlfriend, remembers. He basked in the adulation of the workers who, in the span of three years, had helped make him the richest man in the American toy industry. His annual sales for 1998 had surpassed $1.4 billion—virtually all of it coming from the $2.50 wholesale price on beanbag animals that frenzied speculators had turned into a craze that was the twentieth-century American version of the tulip bubble in 1630s Holland. Ty had created the toys in 1993 in the hope that they would be popular among children, but they had become so much more than that; and they had also become so much less than that because most collectors, aware of the soaring values for the rarest styles, wouldn’t let their children anywhere near them. Humorist Dave Barry explained the mania in a 1998 column: “Beanie Babies were origin
