Beanie Babies
Timeless Collectables
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Beanie Babies are a line of stuffed toys created by American
businessman H. Ty Warner, who founded Ty Inc. in 1986. The toys are
stuffed with plastic pellets rather than conventional soft stuffing.
They come in many different forms, mostly animals.
Beanie Babies began to emerge as popular collectibles in late
1995, and became a hot toy. The company's strategy of
deliberate scarcity, producing each new design in limited quantity,
restricting individual store shipments to limited numbers of each design
and regularly retiring designs, created a huge secondary market for the
toys and increased their popularity and value as a collectible. They
systematically retired various designs, and many people assumed that all
"retired" designs would rise in value the way that early retirees had.
The craze lasted through 1999 and slowly declined after the Ty company
announced that they would no longer be making Beanie Babies and
made a bear called "The End". Some time after the original announcement
that the company would stop production, Ty asked the public to vote on
whether the product should continue; fans and collectors voted
"overwhelmingly" to keep the toys on the market.