The boom and bust of the Beanie Baby; a brief history of the soft toy craze ahead of AppleTV+’s new movie

That’s part of the aspect of AppleTV’s forthcoming film, “The Beanie Bubble,” which arrives on the streaming platform next Friday (July 28), featuring former “Succession” star Sarah Snook, Elizabeth Banks and a clean-shaven Zach Galifianakis, making a welcome return to our screens after the success of his FX series, “Baskets.”

Based on the book “The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute”, written by Zac Bissonnette and released in 2015, the film looks at the rise and fall of the Beanie empire, spearheaded by Ty and Shelia Warner. In particular, the film looks at the collecting craze of the soft toy and ultimately what led to their popularity to wane, and for collectors how their assets bottomed out much like stocks in a stock market. Yes - they were that coveted.

It also gave rise to the phrase “Beanie Baby bubble”; the concept that a collectors items become less rare given the lack of perceived scarcity for an item, leading to a secondary market being oversaturated and ultimately depreciating the costs of what was once considered a “collectors item.”

It was a cautionary tale that other companies looked towards when forming their own collectable items - most recently, Pokemon has discovered a resurgence based in part to some of the cards collected being rare, and in part celebrities such as Logan Paul extolling their wealth based on how rare a Pokemon card they currently hold. So where did it all go right for Ty Warner and his creation, and was it greed that led to the bubble bursting?

How did the Beanie Baby crazy reach its peak in the ‘90s?

It seemed the right time and right place for Ty Warner to launch his bean filled soft toys when the first run of Beanie Babies were released in 1993; people were receptive to collecting as a hobby such as comic books or trading cards, their “cute” appearance was always charming to pass by in a toy store and it was the advent of the internet. That last fact very much helped the craze blow up, becoming what is considered one of the first occasions of the internet “meme-ing” an item and gathering considerable virality.

It also helped that Warner created in effect one of the first e-commerce businesses to grace the early stages of the very thing you use to read this on your phone today. Back in the mid ‘90s, the idea of buying an item directly from a business online (or as experts call it, “business to consumer”/B2C). Much in the same way that the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape was marketed online, the Beanie Baby website allowed collectors to circumvent the stores in order to collect the “holy grails” of the soft toy world - at that stage.

Which would also become its undoing - which we’ll get to.

But the notion of a scarce collectable item played into our instinctive nature of wanting something we can’t have, leading an explosion of interest in the toys as media outlets would report constantly on this new craze and how odd it was that it wasn’t just children that looked to collect this item, but adults also. For a period in the late ‘90s, Beanie Babies became headline news in culture sections in newspapers across the world and even narrative devices for sitcoms and late-night talk show monologues

During the height of the Beanie Baby craze, the toys were flipped for significant profits on platforms like eBay, and they even made up a significant portion of eBay's sales. Some collectors insured their Beanie Babies for thousands of dollars.

The collectible nature of Beanie Babies was further reinforced by their unique creative elements, such as each product having a unique birthday and poem printed on its tag, leading to specialist shops to open up that solely relied on the income that the collectors craze created - despite resistance from Ty Warner, who required retailers who sold Beanie Babies to also stock other product lines from his company to mitigate the risks.

However, his plush monster and the media hype surrounding the collectability of the toys led ultimately to that bubble bursting, and collections of Beanie Babies being sold at fire sale prices to offset just how much some collectors spent on the items.

What led to the bubble bursting regarding Beanie Babies?

A lack of scarcity has long been believed to be the reason the booming Beanie Babies market burst; it was alleged that some of the items were rare, with only a few hundred select soft toys being made. However,  as demand for Beanie Babies soared, Ty Inc. increased production to meet the growing popularity, resulting in an oversupply of Beanie Babies, diluting their perceived scarcity and exclusivity.

What also didn’t help was the speculative nature of Beanie Babies as an investment rather than simply another soft toy. Almost as if historians didn’t warn these collectors of such speculative investments after the debacle of “Tulipmania,” regarded as the first speculative bubble or asset bubble in history.

You see (as I put my most educated reading glasses on),  “a speculative investment is when an investor hopes to profit from a rapid change in the value of an asset, often one that's considered non-productive. Many speculative investments are short-term, and they can be made in markets such as foreign currencies, collectives, fine art, and margin trading of stocks.”

In the case of both Tulips in the Netherlands in the 1600’s and Beanie Babies 399 years later, none of which held a considerable value as a long term investment.

The media hype also led to this idea of the Beanie Babies bubble; such was made about the rarity of some items and camera crews capturing peak-hype collectors scouring stores far and wide in the United States looking for a particular version of a soft toy. Leading to an increased demand for the toys, an increase in production of the product and ultimately the over-saturation of the market leading to that “scarce” product not being quite as challenging to find anymore.

So ultimately, as much as Ty Warner could be to blame for overproducing a product and effectively eliminating the collectable nature of it, we your humble media outlet could also be to blame for whipping up the craze to fever pitch. Perhaps we had lofty expectations about their investment value - or perhaps we just like a pop culture frenzy.

The Beanie Bubble is released on AppleTV+ on July 28 2023.