Description

A bestselling journalist delivers the never-before-told story of the plush animal craze that became the tulip mania of the 1990s . In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. In just three years, collectors who saw the toys as a means of speculation made creator Ty Warner, an eccentric college dropout, a billionaire-without advertising or big-box distribution. Beanie Babies were ten percent of eBay s sales in its early days, with an average selling price of $30-six times the retail price. At the peak of the bubble in 1999, Warner reported a personal income of $662 million-more than Hasbro and Mattel combined. The end of the craze was swift and devastating, with rare Beanie Babies deemed worthless as quickly as they d once been deemed priceless. Bissonnette draws on hundreds of interviews (including a visit to a man who lives with his 40,000 Ty products and an in-prison interview with a guy who killed a coworker over a Beanie Baby debt) for the first book on the strangest speculative mania of all time. —