Why did people sink their savings into little plush toys?

Francis Scialabba

· 5 min read

Few stuffed animals have been more popular among adults than children, and even fewer feel like they’re filled with beans.

The movie about the rise and fall of Beanie Babies—the plush toys that people mistakenly thought would make them rich—hits Apple TV+ today, joining a growing club of new films devoted to putting wigs on A-list actors so they can play out the origin stories of iconic products: Tetris in March, Air (Jordans) in April, BlackBerry in May, Flamin’ Hot (Cheetos) in June, and now, The Beanie Bubble.

Starring Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks and based on a 2015 book, The Beanie Bubble is a mostly true account of the lovable toys’ boom and bust in the ’90s comparable to the NFT and meme stock frenzies that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The $5 pellet-stuffed plush toys had astronomical appreciation estimates: Stripes the Tiger, a 1996 release, was predicted by collectors to skyrocket from $5 to $1,000 by 2008. Forecasts like these were so enticing that one dad invested his kids’ college funds in Beanie Babies, thinking he’d resell them later for a meaty profit.

Spoiler alert: The Beanie bubble burst, leaving that family in a $100,000 hole with memories of weekends spent preserving stuffed animals in plastic.

While it seems obvious that Beanie Babies could only ride the tide for so long before crashing down to the depths of eBay, hindsight’s 20/20. And it’s not like people have learned from asset bubbles in the past: After all, a bunch of 21st-century bored humans threw their blockchain wallets at Bored Apes.

An asset bubble expert and market historian told Vox that our tendency to fall for the overinflation of a product’s value is “a flaw in the human character” and that “no one is immune, no matter how smart you are.”

At the height of the frenzy, people were ruining relationships and committing felonies to get their hands on some sacks of fuzz.

Barely anyone cared about Beanie Babies when Ty Inc. first started selling characters like Cubbie the Brown Bear and Legs the Frog in 1994. Stores only got lines out the door once the toy’s creator, now-billionaire Ty Warner, began pulling strings to juice demand.

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This, combined with Warner’s decision to start “retiring” certain animals in 1995, created artificial scarcity and a mass panic to stock up on Beanie Babies. Soon, an aggressive resale market was born, replete with magazines, blogs, and even trade shows.

One woman’s guide to the secondary Beanie Babies market got so popular that she was selling 650,000 copies per month and, on many days, doing two or three radio interviews before her kids woke up for school. Ty Inc. later gave her an award for boosting sales.

At Peak Beanie mania, Ty Inc. and legions of speculators could not stop making money:

But most regular people didn’t sell their Beanie Babies at their peak price. And unfortunately for them, the hype subsided. Anticipating a drop in interest as more kids reached for Pokémon and Furbies, Ty Inc. announced it would stop making Beanie Babies at the end of 1999, which poked a hole in collectors’ this-will-never-not-be-popular mentality and sent demand plummeting.

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