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The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute
Zac Bissonnette
2015, 260 pages
Nonfiction
Do you remember Beanie Babies? If you grew up in the 1990s you probably had one or two at some point.
The cute beanbag toys, which came out in 1993, were originally for kids; and then, as buyers began to see the toys as collectibles, the market exploded.
With The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, Zac Bissonnette explores the rise of Beanie Babies, the creation of the speculative bubble, and its implosion after only seven years. His major focus is on Ty Warner, the creator of Beanie Babies and owner of toy company Ty Inc.
Warner, who has been described as the Steve Jobs of toys, was a perfectionist willing to scrap entire product lines if they weren’t up to his standards, which incidentally created the demand for “retired,” unavailable Beanies. But what really drove the bubble, as Bissonnette points out, were the collectors who believed that their toys would continue to gain in value indefinitely, and the media, which hyped occasional high-profile sales into everyday events.
One interesting fact that Bissonnette highlights is that Beanie Babies were one of the driving factors behind the development of ebay as a viable auction site (as hard as that may be to believe now). Beanie Baby sales amounted to 10 percent of eBay auctions, and the instability of their market was even mentioned as a risk factor in eBay’s intial public offering. Investors were right to be cautious; by early 2000, the market for Beanie Babies was gone. Although The Great Beanie Baby Bubble is engrossing, Bissonnette trails off slightly at the end. There’s no closure to the story of Ty Warner and his beanbag toys; just an ending, as there is for any bubble.
