Ty Warner and the Beanie Phenomenon
The craze for bean filled toys all started with Ty Warner. Ty Warner is a very private man who is considered a marketing genius and entrepreneur. He was born on 3 September 1939 in Illinois. His father was a toy salesman. Ty also went to work as a toy salesman, for a company called Dakin, from 1963 to 1980.
In 1985, he founded Ty Inc (TM). He started off by making and selling toy cats filled with "beans" (which are in fact, plastic pellets). In 1993, he released nine Beanie Babies. They debuted in stores in 1994 and took a while to catch on buy when they did, the results were phenomenal!! Children took a huge interest in the toys because they were cute, cheap and easy to carry around.
In 1996, Ty announced his first retirements. This stunned the beanie world at the time. But his strategy of retiring existing styles and introducing new ones made the toys even hotter, and created a thriving secondary collectibles market. Ty's beanies sell for about $5.00 but some of the more rare ones can sell for several thousand dollars on the secondary market! The approach of limiting the life span of toys has been taken on by various other toy manufacturers as well.
In 1997, Ty and McDonalds launched a Happy Meal/Teenie Beanies promotion which became the most successful promotion in McDonalds history. 100 million toys were
distributed!! The craze for beanie toys has meant that Ty is now famous world wide and has chalked up over one billion dollars in sales.
In August 1998, Ty announced through his website that all the beanies would be retired on 31 December 1999 at 11.59pm. Imagine the speculation and confusion this caused in the beanie world!! Then, in early 2000, Ty held a customer vote to see if beanies should continue, and the vote was overwhelmingly YES.
Ty Warner is very secretive about his activities... he never gives interviews, never makes public appearances and employees are not allowed to talk about his private life in public. The office headquarters are also private... there are no signs on the building or street number on the front door. Ty does not advertise except via his website. This restriction of information only adds fuel to the fire as collectors try to guess what will happen next!!
Ty now produces several lines:
Beanie Babies
Beanie Buddies
Baby Ty
Attic Treasures
Ty Classic
Beanie Kids
Ty Warner has been accredited with boosting the toy industry in general and also the fortunes of other bean bag toy companies.
BeansTalk, 2000
