🧸 Beanie Babies: The Cutest Boom, Bubble & Bust
08:54 Share

Yetis, Nick and Jack here from the T-Boy Studio. Today, we're going to play you a sample from our other show, The Best Idea Yet, on Beanie Babies. Get this, at one point in the 1990s, Beanie Babies made more profit than Mattel and Hasbro. Combined! Combined!

It's wild. Collectors wanted these stuffed animals so bad that at one point, Beanie Babies represented 10% of all sales on eBay. Oh, it was a wild boom, a wild bust, and we cover all of it on this episode. Here's a short sample of our episode on Beanie Babies. After it's done, subscribe to The Best Idea Yet so you can hear the rest. And you're going to want to hear the rest. Let's play the clip, Jack.

A white Rolls Royce silver shadow glides up to a hotel entrance. The door opens and out steps a man. He's in his mid-30s, but he has a youthful elf-like aura. What stands out, though, is his fur coat, his top hat, and a cane that he starts twirling as soon as he springs onto the sidewalk. It's like he just stepped out of a 1920s gangster flick.

He's got a briefcase in his hand. Maybe he's about to make some kind of shady backroom deal. Except when he flips open the case, it's not filled with cash or stolen jewels.

It's crammed with stuffed toys. This is Ty Warner, and he's not your typical toy salesman. And I don't just mean because of his wardrobe. In 1980, where our story begins, he's pulling in six figures when the median U.S. household income was around $20,000. Ty's making well over $1 million in today's money, all from selling stuffed animals to toy shops. But Jack, it's not just the money that Ty loves.

This guy, he's about the attention. And he's realized something pretty important. Being the most flamboyant guy in his sales district makes him unforgettable. And that makes him very, very good at selling stuff. And honestly, that tracks with his past. Yeah, because he's always wanted to be center stage.

Literally. Before the Rolls Royce and the fur coats, he was an aspiring actor. He grew up in Chicago, spent a year studying drama at Kalamazoo College, but he dropped out and moved to Hollywood to make it big in the movies. Instead, though, Ty waited tables, parked cars, even sold vacuum cleaners door to door. And after five years of rejection, packed it in and headed back home to Chi-town. ♪

That's when he lands a sales job at Dakin, a company that sells stuffed toys. You probably haven't heard of Dakin, but they were big from the 1960s to the early 80s. Their standout product is a line called Dream Pets. I'm looking at the picture now, Jack. Dream Pets are like a velveteen-covered stuffed animal

They're colorful, dare I say even a bit trippy, like a cabbage patch kid who got stuck at Woodstock for too long. They look heavy. They are because their stuffing is made of sawdust and wood chips, literally, and it's packed so tightly that these things are basically rock solid. They're less of a bedtime snuggle, more of a makeshift weapon against nighttime intruders. But these zany-looking, brightly colored bears, turtles, octopi, and tigers, they suit Ty's sales pitch.

His over-the-top personality, honed in Hollywood, grabs his customers' attention every time. Let me tell you my favorite story about when Ty was selling vacuums door-to-door. ♪

As soon as the homeowner would open their door, Ty would throw a handful of dirt onto the floor in front of them, like inside their home on the hardwood floor, and then immediately vacuum it up with the vacuum that he was trying to sell. The one vacuum sale was worth the 50% of the time the homeowner calls the police. But Ty has another skill. He has a unique talent that his toy shop clients love. Ty has an almost supernatural ability to know which toys are going to be hits.

This, along with his tenacity, means that he can close more deals than anyone else at Dakin. In fact, Ty makes more in a month selling to toy stores than he did in a year as an actor. Some years, he's even earning more than Dakin's CEO is. I mean, Ty missed out on his chance to join the Hollywood Brad Pack, but now he's got a starring role at a top toy company not too shabby. Unfortunately, though, the fame goes to his head.

Ty's arrogance and main character energy doesn't go over well with his colleagues, but as long as his sales numbers are strong, his bosses at Dakin don't care until Ty crosses a line.

Yeah, in 1980, after more than a decade as Dakin's deal closer, one of Ty's customers tips off the company. Turns out Ty isn't just selling Dakin toys, he's selling his own plush line on the side. We don't know where Ty was sourcing these toys, or even if he was hand-stuffing them himself. But that didn't matter to Dakin when they found out. Yeah, side-hustling his own toys that compete with his employer? Not even my little pony could forgive that.

So Ty's bosses, yeah, they fire him. But does Ty regret it, apologize, and never, ever, ever pinky swear do it again? Nope. Ty doubles down and starts his own plush toy company. But for the first time in his life, the market, it's actually moving against Ty. It's 1980. Inflation spikes, unemployment soars, and Americans, they're more focused on buying milk and bread than teddy bears. In just a few months, Ty goes from king of plush to having the stuffing knocked out of him.

This guy has built his entire life around selling fluffy bears and cuddly monkeys. So struggling to sell these toys, it's bigger than a financial hit for him. It's a full-on identity crisis. Without those soft toys, Ty Warner is nothing. So he does what any exhausted American who got a $1 million bonus last year would do. He flies off to Italy's Amalfi Coast for some R&R. Italia, andiamo.

The scent of lemon trees and sea salt drifts through the air as Ty Warner weaves his way through the winding clifftop alleys of Sorrento, Italy. He came to this small, beautiful shoreline town to clear his head. But despite the Mediterranean sunshine, Ty is still in a funk. But then something catches his eye. Among the hand-stitched leather purses and delicate lace shawls in the markets, he sees a stuffed cat.

He picks it up. The fur is soft, almost weightless. It's floppy, not stiff, settling naturally right in the palm of his hand. He presses the paw, and he feels tiny plastic pellets shifting about like small little beans. Ty looks down into the cat's glossy, strangely expressive eyes and smiles. He feels his mood lift, and a new sense of purpose fills his entire body.

Remember, Ty's special power is spotting toy trends before they're toy trends. To the casual shopper, this floppy Italian feline is cute, but nothing special. But Ty sees them differently.

Remember those Dakin dream pets that he used to sell? They were cute, yeah, but basically sawdust crammed into velveteen. They were stiff, they were rigid, more for display than for play. Kind of like a taxidermied animal. But these cats, they're soft and they're floppy. They bend, slouch, and settle into your grip. You can flop them over your shoulder and it feels like they're snuggling with you. And this is Ty's key insight. These Italian toys are only half

half-filled with stuffing. Typically, doing something halfway would seem the cheap thing to do. But in this case, the half-filled toy is actually more satisfying, more engaging, and maybe, ironically, even more premium.

In that moment, Ty sees his future. This could be his chance to outshine his old employer, the guys who fired him. But Jack, this is the mid-80s, and although the economy's picking up, it is actually a terrible time to launch a new soft toy business. In this moment...

plastic toys are booming. That's where the money is. There's huge cartoon tie-ins like the Care Bears, the Transformers, and He-Man. And although Barbie launched way back in 1959, she's still riding high, rocking big hair, big shoulder pads, and big sales. But if there is one thing Ty believes in more than these stuffed cats, it's himself. So he puts all the money that he saved up into founding his new toy company, which, true to his ego, he names Ty Inc.,

So, Yetis, that's it. That's the sample of the Beanie Babies. To hear the rest of that wild story, tap the link in the show notes to subscribe to The Best Idea Yet. Each week, Jack and I go deep on the most viral products of all time. Our most popular episode so far is Costco's Kirklander brand. Yes, it is. So, if you love T-Boy, you're going to love The Best Idea Yet. Tap the link we put in this episode description, follow the show, listen every week. We drop them every Tuesday. And we