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 originally intended as fun playthings for children, but as the old saying goes, 'Whenever you have something intended as innocent fun for children, you can count on adults to turn it into an obsessive, grotesquely over-commercialized "hobby" with the same whimsy content as the Bataan Death March.'" The first buyers had been children with allowances. Then their moms had started collecting.
By the time of the 1998 Ty Christmas party, Van Guilder remembers, it was mostly "creepy, belligerent men" she saw lined up when she dropped in to check on retailers. The little animals with names like Seaweed the Otter and Gigi the Poodle had become, as Van Guilder puts it, "something really cute that just brought out the worst in people." The "worst in people" was inspired by a popular belief that Beanie Babies were a long-term investment. A self-published author sold more than three million copies of a book that touted ten-year predictions for their values. The magazine Mary Beth's Beanie World , started by a self-described soccer mom, reached one million copies in paid monthly circulation. In it, a full-page, full-color ad for Smart Heart tag protectors led with this headline: "How Do You Protect an Investment That Increases by 8,400%?" The answer was to buy hard-shell lockets in which to encase the animals' heart-shaped paper tags that read "Safety Precaution: Please remove all swing tags before giving this item to a child." More than any other consumer good in history, Beanie Babies were carried to the height of success by a collective dream that their values would always rise. Warner's announcement of bonuses wasn't his only gift to his employees at the Christmas party.
He also presented them with #1 Bear, a signed and numbered red Beanie Baby with the number 1 stitched onto the chest. The inside of the hangtag explained that only 253 of the bears had been produced. It also listed the company's achievements for the year: more than $3 billion in retail sales, number one in the gift category, number one in collectibles, and number one in cash register area sales. The workers inspected the bears and cheered some more. No doubt some were moved by sentiment, but they also knew that the bear could be listed on eBay, where Beanie Babies comprised 10 percent of all sales. On eBay, Beanie Babies sold for an average of $30-six times the price they had originally retailed for. Within a few weeks, #1 Bears would be selling for $5,000 or more apiece. Not everyone at the luncheon was so thrilled.
Faith McGowan sat quietly. In late 1993, Warner had shown her and her two daughters from her previous marriage who lived with them the first prototype for Legs the Frog. Since then, the animals had been the sole focus of their time together. Even as sales exploded, Ty personally designed every piece the company put out, and that meant spending several months each year at the factories in Asia. The frantic pace of their life together was exhausting, and Ty, a throwback to an entrepreneurial archetype that no longer exists, wasn't slowing down. Today, most rags-to-megariches stories involve hot technology, venture capital, and high-profile initial public offerings. Ty skipped all of that, marketing his own products based on his own ideas and the feedback of everyone around him without ever hiring a marketing consultant or assembling a focus group. He'd been the business's only shareholder since he'd started it in his condo in 1983, and when the investment bankers came peddling nine- and then ten-figure deals, Warner declined the dinner invitations.
"Most guys would at least have the decency to jerk you around," remembers one banker. "He wouldn't even talk to you." McGowan worried that she was losing him. He'd told her they would get married, and he'd even shown her father the ring he'd gotten her. But that had been more than a year ago, and there was no sign of a wedding on the horizon. She was terrified about what would happen if their life together came to an end. A few weeks after the party, Ty informed her that his pretax income for the year had come in at $700 million-more than Mattel's and Hasbro's earnings combined. Over in England, Ty's ex-girlfriend Patricia Roche had become rich running the company's distribution there.
Faith was apprehensive about Ty's continuing relationship with Roche. More pressingly, Faith was worried that, for all the money Ty had made, she had no assets in her own name. "If Ty changed the locks on the Oak Brook house while the girls were at school or I was at work, I had nothing," Faith remembered in an unpublished memoir. "No house. No money in the bank. No employee severance. Not even a credit card." After the party was over, McGowan prepared for the worst.
Ty had presented her with the first #1 Bear-1 of 253-and she quickly sold it to a local collectibles dealer for ten thousand dollars and a promise not to tell anyone where he'd gotten it. She used the money to seed an emergency fund in case her five-year relationship with a man who was now a billionaire imploded. Her decision to sell was well timed. That Christmas party happened to mark the absolute height of the Beanie craze, and the beginning of its spectacularly rapid decline. The new millennium was approaching, and the bubble was about to burst. _______ I was in middle school when the Beanies hit and I remember a couple I had. But mostly I remember the Beanie Baby dealers who sprouted at Cape Cod's Dick & Ellie's flea market, which my mother and I visited every weekend. I remember the adults wearing fanny packs and visors, eagerly discussing the "secondary market" fluctuations driving up the prices of pieces they'd paid $5 for a few weeks earlier.
The Beanie sellers had the busiest booths and, for a couple of years, it really did look like the dealers sticking with Shaker furniture and oil paintings were as out of touch as Warren Buffett seemed to be when he eschewed Internet stocks in favor of acquiring Dairy Queen in late 1997. I hadn't thought about Beanie Babies at all in at least ten years until, on a wintry day in 2010, I stopped at Kimballs, an auction house down the road from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I was a year away from graduating into the worst job market in a generation, and the fallout from the recent speculative mania in real estate was never far from anyone's mind. At Kimballs, I was given a reminder of the aftermath of a smaller speculative mania: three large Rubbermaid containers on a table in the back of the room holding at least five hundred Beanie Babies, all with plastic lockets protecting their hangtags. Some were preserved individually in Lucite containers. There was another large box of magazines and price guides with names like Beanies & More , Beanie Collector , Beans! Magazine , and Beanie Mania. Then there were spreadsheets and checklists-how many of each Beanie Baby the collector/speculator had, which ones she was missing, how much was paid, and estimates of current value (as of 1998 or 1999). More interesting than the Beanies themselves was the manifest conviction of whoever had assembled the collection that it would one day be of great value.
Everything on display was perfectly preserved and, as we found out when the auction started at 6:00 p.m., almost worthless. The entire lot sold for less than a hundred dollars-probably well below 2 percent of its value.