A Better Bag of Beans

There are few wholesome pockets of the internet, but I would rank r/beaniebabies high among them. The Beanie Babies subreddit is apparently in the top 6% by size and boasts 17k members actively discussing a toy that peaked 25 years ago. No consumer fad goes unmemorialized on the internet, but what might be more surprising is how many people are only starting to collect Beanie Babies now. “Picked this little guy up at a thrift store!” and “Found these in the basement and had to rescue them!” posts are common, as are people posting pictures of their latest plush rescue haul from a garage sale. The urge to acquire adorable stuffed animals is apparently impervious to time and market conditions.

Ty Inc. was making a billion dollars a year selling Beanie Babies by the end of the 90s. Yes, that’s “illion” with a “b”. With sales figures that high it might be more reasonable to purchase Beanie Babies by the pound, but people were absolutely convinced that their Beanie Babies would be worth big money based on rarity. Beanie Babies are now a classic case study in artificial scarcity, early B2C engagement ploys, and arguably one of the first viral marketing campaigns in the internet’s history. You want to learn about economics? Stare into the button-eyed soul of the Beanie Babies and you’ll see the spirit of the Dutch tulip bubble reborn in polyester plush.

Beanie Babies, like the Millennial kids who collected them originally, bridge the analog-digital gap. The adorable heart-shaped hang tags with the bio and a cute little poem also encouraged you to visit the ty.com website. As far as I can tell, this was the first time anyone had tried to encourage digital engagment via a toy. Unless you’re buying a bunch of carrots directly from a farm stand, the odds of you now encountering a consumer product without an associated website (and social media handles and a QR code leading you there!) are vanishingly small. The idea that you could go to a website after purchasing something and learn more about it was a wild and novel concept in 1996. Even wilder was notion that you might interact with other people who had purchased the same product and bond over the shared experience of owning Ziggy the Zebra. Millennials grew up in the crepusculum between 80s and 90s tactility—a Beanie Baby wouldn’t be a half-bad improvised weapon in a playground fight—and Y2K digital expansion. Buy a stuffed animal and then visit the stuffed animal’s website.

Given that digital history and how the interet eventually evolved, the 17,000 members of r/beaniebabies are simply carrying on the tradition of going online to learn more about their cherished collectibles. If they were OG hoarders, they’ve been trained to do this since grade school. The real legacy of Beanie Babies isn’t their boom and bust cycle but how they trained a generation of kids to take their fandom online.