Some clever (and slightly diabolical) business moves from Ty Inc. Despite their low retail value, adult collectors saw the toys as an opportunity to get rich. It was the mid-'90s, and the huggable animals with their own names and personalities were not only popular with kids, but their parents, too. Seemingly overnight, the Beanie Baby craze then exploded. After reading the poem she had written for Stripes the Tiger, Warner gave her the green light to write the tag copy for the rest of the Beanie Babies line. By assigning birthdays and poems to each character and printing them inside their hang tags, the company could emphasize their collectible nature. Around 1995, Lina Trivedi-a member of Ty Inc.’s small team of employees-came to Warner with a new idea to make Beanie Babies more appealing to customers. Unlike Warner’s cats, these toys were small enough to fit in a pocket, and they were affordable at $5 a piece.ĭespite standing out in a crowded market, Beanie Babies weren’t an immediate hit: The same qualities that made them unique made them puzzling to retailers and consumers. This new plush line featured a variety of colorful, beady-eyed animals, like a purple platypus named Patti after Warner’s ex-girlfriend Patricia Roche who ran the company’s UK distribution. perfected this concept in 1993, when the original line of Beanie Babies debuted at the World Toy Fair in New York City. Ty Warner with Beanie Baby display at the American International Toy Fair. This wasn’t a cost-cutting measure, as some skeptics in the industry assumed by understuffing his cats with “fluid” plastic pieces, Warner made them posable, and thus more lifelike to kids. They weren’t Beanie Babies, but they shared a key feature with the plush animals that would later make the company famous: The cats were under-stuffed with PVC pellets. originally sold life-sized plush cats inspired by toys Warner encountered during a stint in Italy. Ty Warner founded his own toy company in 1986. Magic BeansĪfter giving up on an acting career and getting fired from a toy salesman job, a 40-something H. Before catching The Beanie Bubble in select theaters on July 21 and Apple TV+ on July 28, read the real story behind the phenomenon. The idea that collectors thought their pellet-stuffed toys would be worth thousands sounds stranger than fiction, but as the boxes of Beanies Babies moldering in countless attics prove, it was once a reality. The film follows Ty Inc.’s meteoric rise and fall from grace when the Beanie Bubble burst at the turn of the new millennium. He’s also the namesake of the iconic heart-shaped tags that adorn every Beanie Baby. Ty Warner, the founder of the company that set the toy collector world ablaze three decades ago. The plot of the new Apple movie The Beanie Bubble will sound familiar to anyone who lived through the 1990s.
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