I have always felt like the mania for Beanie Babies presaged the Dot Com bubble in an important sociological way. The same factors were at work, the same unbridled enthusiasm, and the same apparent endless supplies of cash. And at the end of the speculation rush, the bubble popped, leaving "investors" with fistfuls of useless crap.
Beanie Babies were launched in 1993 with only nine animals: frog, pig, dog, dolphin, whale, moose, platypus, bear, and lobster. Ty Warner, the company that made them, expressed some breathtaking cunning with their marketing strategy. They positioned their toys as collectibles, created an artificial scarcity by limiting production, and carefully controlled the release dates and locations.
Within a few years, Ty Warner's strategy had paid off for the company big time. In the dire financial climate of the mid 90s recession, stories of people making a killing off Beanie Babies only fueled the fervor. Soon there were magazines and books devoted to the hobby of collecting the little plush toys. It was obvious to everyone on the outside that the market would eventually collapse, but that didn't stop people from buying them.
It became difficult to separate collectors from hoarders. During the course of the Beanie Baby Years I worked in several offices, and knew a number of people (men and women both - although mostly women) who had filled several storage tubs with Beanie Babies. And they just kept buying more, and stuffing them into storage tubs, and then complaining at the end of the month when they had trouble paying their car insurance bill.
You could always spot these people immediately, because their cubicles were inevitably littered with Beanie Babies. It was like a boast, "I'm collecting my way out of this corporate hellhole!"
In 1996, Teenie Beanie Babies came to McDonald's Happy Meals, paving the way for it to seem acceptable for grown adults to order Happy Meals. The miniature Beanie Babies spread across cubicle farms and offices like a plague. They were just so little and cute! And hey, some of them were worth a lot of money. Briefly.
I still have to marvel at a world in which people became convinced that stuffed animals were an investment commodity. How did that happen? And why something as childish as stuffed animals? Twenty-odd years later, I think it has something to do with people knowing that they should behave like an adult (by putting their money into investments) but still wanting to act like a child (by buying stuffed animals). The perfect storm of financial foolishness, in other words!