A few Beanie Babies live in Janelle Mota’s massive, glass-doored china cabinet, and by “a few,” we mean thousands.
The Antioch grandmother’s precious Ty Beanies — the adorable plush toys she bought during the mid-1990s craze – are crammed inside the case, fuzzy-bear-elbow-to-fuzzy-jelly-fish-tentacle-to-fuzzy-flamingo-wing-to-fuzzy-unicorn-horn, their sweet, vacant, beady-eyed stares pressed up against the glass. “It’s like a Beanie store in here,” she says.
At Helen Pereira’s Martinez home, more Beanies – 516 to be exact – are carefully categorized, bagged and tagged (with special plastic tag protectors, of course) in at least two dozen 12-quart bins. Still more reside in Cathy McCause Fuss’ attic in Martinez – a collection of more than 1,000. “They were even a disputed item in my divorce settlement,” she says. And the Beanies of Jenelle Mezzetti’s little brother are sealed away in the family’s Palo Alto attic. “Almost like in ‘Toy Story 3’ before they get sent to Sunnyside,” she says.
That’s a bounty of Beanies right there. And yet there are more, hibernating in closets and garages everywhere. People purchased millions upon millions of them at the height of the mania, many with investment in mind, convinced they’d increase in value: “They will put my kids through college,” was a common mantra. But the Beanie-to-gold-mine alchemy didn’t work, and — with the exception of a very few — most aren’t worth the beans they’re stuffed with.
Beanie bonanza
Introduced in 1993, Beanie Babies were the creation of Ty Warner (hence the Ty on the tags), who is often considered the Steve Jobs of plush toys. Sales of the critters — mostly bears, but also camels, octopuses, monkeys, turtles, you name it – initially started slow, but caught on with collectors and hit just as home-internet access and eBay took off.
Beanies soon swept through the nation with a relentless momentum like a really soft, cute tsunami. It swelled into one of the biggest toy-buying crazes in history, putting Cabbage Patch Kids, Furbies and Tamagotchis to shame. People fought over them, traded them, stood in line outside stores for them — iPhone-upgrade-style.
When the Teenie Beanie Baby version came out – sold in McDonald’s Happy Meals — Kathy Drewke of Pittsburg started collecting them for her sister and co-workers.
“We went crazy-loco over the little ones” she says. “We would go driving around to all of these different McDonald’s ordering Happy Meals. Nobody wanted to eat a hamburger anymore. It got to the point where we’d say, just give us the toy.”
For some, like Drewke, the fun was in the hunt. It was the ‘90s real-world equivalent of Pokemon Go. People would search high and low for limited-edition bears, and instead of throwing a virtual ball to catch them, they’d throw cash. There were price guides, magazines, handbooks, conventions. People were paying hundreds for something that had an original price tag of $5.
“I really didn’t know what I was in for, and UPS didn’t either,” says Dorothy Baker, who owned a gift shop in Danville at the time. “When I started stocking Beanies, ladies would follow the (UPS) trucks to see if they carried the TY boxes. We had to limit how many could be purchased at one time. It was truly a crazy, but profitable, time.”
But that time passed quickly. And while some buyers/sellers did make money at the peak of Beanie popularity, the market couldn’t bear the glut. By the turn of the century, there were probably 80,000 listings for Beanies on eBay, Beanie experts say. Now two decades after the boom, only a few of the very rarest ones — first editions of certain critters with specific tags — will bring some bucks. Only if someone’s willing to buy.
Be advised, just because a Beanie is priced for sale at a certain amount online, it doesn’t mean that’s what it sells for — if it sells at all, says Leon Schlossberg, who, with his daughter Sondra, runs TyCollector.com, providing reference information about Ty products.
The Schlossbergs point to false stories about people striking it rich with various bears, the most overly hyped Beanie being the Princess bear – deep purple bears produced in 1997 to raise money for a memorial fund after Princess Diana’s death. Snopes.com debunked a viral story in 2015 about a British couple who supposedly made $90,000 selling one of those.
“Princess is hyped so far beyond its actual value that I find it difficult to believe people actually fall for the stories,” Schlossberg says. “Even the earliest edition of Princess, which was made in Indonesia for the non-USA markets and had a Canadian customs ‘tush’ tag, is barely worth $150 today.”
But don’t cry for the Beanies. While the average Beanie “investor” may have taken a bath, Warner’s company reportedly made more than $6 billion from Ty products in the 1990s alone.
The power of cute
Most Beanie collectors are resigned to the fact their precious troves won’t finance their retirement. And investment wasn’t the main goal for many, anyway.
“I just thought they were the cutest thing,” Mota says. “It was just a hobby that was all mine, and my husband was very supportive. I still just love looking at them.”
Indeed, Beanies are still much loved and still considered collectibles. But other Ty products are more popular with today’s kids, such as the Beanie Boo stuffed toys — similar little critters, but with huge eyes like hypnotized space aliens.
And while most original Beanies stay hidden away like reclusive celebrities with faded careers, some have moved on to other lives. Fuss uses them as ornaments on her tree. Pamela Williams of Oakland puts 50 of her Christmas-themed bears on display in the Moraga library each year.
“They do make absolutely fabulous table decorations at baby showers,” says Cindy Shanker of Los Gatos. Meri Maben of San Jose says when the craze began to fade, her enterprising sons set out to recoup their money with “The Great Beanie Baby Sale” in front of their house. “Unfortunately, this venture was as successful as their previous one — selling used tennis balls at the tennis courts.”
Jean F. of Redwood City finally gave in last year and donated part of her collection to her church to be packed with the children’s brown bag lunch program. The rest went to a nursing home to be used as Bingo prizes.
“So they did exceed their value,” she says. “Just as we planned!”
