Beanie

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Beanies are equipped with plastic pellets (Engl. Beans ) stuffed cuddly toys of from Ty Warner founded company Ty . Due to a special sales concept with a limited edition, a kind of speculative bubble developed in the late 1990s when beanie babies were temporarily used as speculative objects.

Product lines

There are the product lines Beanie-Baby (small) and Beanie-Buddy (large). Each beanie comes with a tag , a small heart-shaped pendant on which your name and a saying are noted.

Sales concept

Beanie models are only produced for a limited period of time. After an individual model has been discontinued, the item is referred to as retired (freely translated: retired). There is also a special bear for many countries, e.g. B. "Germania" for Germany, which was only delivered to this country.

Beanies as a collector's item

Due to the supposed scarcity caused by the sales concept, these cuddly toys have become very popular in some collectors' circles . With consumers, hopes of price increases were aroused due to a low selling price and a limited edition, which led to the cuddly toys being used as an object of speculation. As a result, they initially appreciated in value (from starting price of $ 5 in 1995 to around $ 250 in 1998) and created a beanie baby bubble that burst in the late 1990s after Ty announced the discontinuation of the series in 1999. According to a television documentary, there was a family in California who at the time had invested more than $ 100,000 and were financially ruined after the bubble burst. Today beanie babies are only traded significantly above their initial value in individual cases.

literature

  • Zac Bissonnette: The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute . Portfolio, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1591846024 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Week of July 19, 2013: The great Beanie Baby bubble Shockingly, stuffed animals are not a fantastic investment after all by John Aziz.
  2. ↑ David Winograd: Family Spent $ 100,000 On Beanie Babies Thinking 'Investment' Would Put Kids Through College (VIDEO) . In: Huffington Post . July 25, 2013 ( huffingtonpost.com [accessed June 24, 2018]).