Beanie baby

A Beanie Baby is a stuffed animal filled with plastic pellets, or "beans," rather than stuffing (see PVC). A Beanie Baby is a form of bean bag.

The original Beanie Babies were created by 1996, a faddish craze of collecting Beanie Babies began. In a buying frenzy reminiscent of the Cabbage Patch Kid mania of the early 1980s, several speculators purchased these collectibles en masse in hopes of making a fortune years later from being able to sell rare specimens.

Ty fed the frenzy by systematically "retiring" various designs of Beanie Babies and ceasing their production. Estimates of the number of each Beanie Baby that would survive years into the future were much lower than the reality, however, and much like the Cabbage Patch Kid phenomenon, so many people had similar plans that very few people profited from the craze.

Like the Internet stocks of the period, this was a recent example of an economic bubble.