The Great Beanie Baby Bubble

Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute

by

Hardcover, 260 pages

English language

Published Jan. 17, 2015

ISBN:
978-1-59184-602-4
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
892304877

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4 stars (1 review)

In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. With no advertising or big-box distribution, creator Ty Warner - an eccentric college dropout - become a billionaire in just three years. And it was all thanks to collectors.

The end of the craze was just as swift and extremely 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 most extraordinary craze of the 1990s.

2 editions

reviewed The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette

excellent investigation & analysis

4 stars

This book was entertaining, depressing, and insightful. I am the perfect age to have been caught up in the Beanie Baby craze as a child, and I had a ton of them, but hadn’t really given it much thought for like 2 decades. It’s really interesting/terrifying to think about how Beanie Babies kind of launched and legitimized buying stuff online, and definitely gave a big leg up to eBay. Do we have Ty to thank for surveillance capitalism? Maybe!

Subjects

  • Beanie Babies (Trademark)
  • Inc Ty
  • Collectors and collecting
  • Toy industry
  • History

Places

  • United States