You're Wrong About
You're Wrong About
Beanie Babies with Jamie Loftus
They’re winsome and soft and so fun to cuddle/ With one of Ty’s Beanie Babies, you could never go wrong/ But they were all born from a toxic puddle/ It really was capitalism all along.
This week, Jamie Loftus tells us the story of the greatest toy fad of the 90s, and liberates us from our tiny plastic boxes.
Here's where to find Jamie:
Jamie's Website
Support us:
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Links:
http://www.jamieloftus.xyz/
http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com
Sarah: And he’s like, I got this far by not listening to anyone and by believing that all the good ideas I stole from people were actually mine. So don't worry about it.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, as always, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This week, I am so happy to tell you that we are learning about Beanie Babies with Jamie Loftus, two of my favorite entities on this planet.
We are getting into the holiday season. Actually, we're right in the thick of it, I would say. And I really wanted to get into the sort of child's play, corporate possession, sinister fad toy angle of it all, and talk about Beanie Babies, because I have skin in this game. I was the kind of child whose innocence was corrupted by collector's guidebooks that told me to save my Princess Diana Beanie Bear in a clear acrylic box, and it haunts me to this day.
I am so excited to have Jamie back on the show. I love anything that she does on podcasts. She makes me excited for what's happening in our medium because of her, and excited to get to work with her whenever I can. She was here a lot about this time last year, talking with me about the Amityville Horror and the Warrens, the inspiration for the hit haunted house horror movie series, the Conjuring. She has a recent podcast series called Ghost Church. She's done a lot of short series that are all amazing, and she is the co-host of Bechdel Cast.
If you want to support us and get bonus episodes, we have one out just recently about Fleetwood Mac and the recording of Rumors, and you can do that on Apple+ subscriptions or Patreon. Or spend that money on a nice fad toy from your childhood that probably is very cheap on eBay right now. Let's get into the episode. Don't buy any possessed toys. Don't become possessed by the spirit of capitalism. Happy holidays.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you why your beanie elephant didn't appreciate the way you thought it would. And with me it's Jamie Loftus.
Jamie: Hi Sarah.
Sarah: Hi. How are you?
Jamie: I'm very excited to talk about one of life's great passions, Beanie Babies.
Sarah: I want to share with you before I get started, the cursed beverage that I will be drinking through this episode that I found at Safeway last night. I don't know if you can read this.
Jamie: Oh, I haven't seen this one. Mountain Dew Fruit Quake. They did it again.
Sarah: It's a fruitcake flavored Mountain Dew.
Jamie: Oh my God. Have you cracked it yet?
Sarah: No, I have been waiting for this moment. I think that Fruit Quake flavored Mountain Dew embodies this show in a sense, because these are two of the most maligned flavors in America. So let's crack her open.
Jamie: All right. Let's see what she's got.
Sarah: It's good. It does not taste like fruitcake. It tastes like a maraschino cherry.
Jamie: Ooh. It's got like Shirley Temple energy about it?
Sarah: Yes. And so, Jamie?
Jamie: Yes.
Sarah: Who are you? What do you do? You can talk about your work and also just about completely random stuff. All of it will be great.
Jamie: Okay. So I'm a comedian and podcaster and I've written on TV, but that's not relevant to the discussion. So I've made a bunch of podcasts. I do the Bechdel Cast with my friend Caitlin Durante, which you've been a guest on. It's a feminist movie podcast. And then I do a bunch of investigative stuff. So I made a show called, My Year in Mensa, which is about what it sounds like. I infiltrated Mensa for a year, and it went terribly.
Sarah: And yet produced an amazing podcast. It's like the Fitz Carraldo of podcasts. Horrible time, great podcast.
Jamie: The cost versus benefit, unclear. So I've also done shows about the legacy of Lolita. That was also not a very fun one. The legacy of Cathy Comics. Much more fun. I did a show called Ghost Church this year, that was about a community of psychics who live in central Florida. And I'm writing a book about hotdogs. So a lot of topics are flying around.
Sarah: So what is a Beanie Baby?
Jamie: Okay. So a beanie Baby was a really popular, originally American but it became popular across the world, beanbag plush toy that was released in the early 1990s. People liked them because they were a little under-stuffed, so they were very poseable and cute. They became huge collectors’ items. So they were just basically these like cute $5 toys, but you couldn't get them at a Walmart, you couldn't get them at any big box store. You could only get them at small Hallmark-y kind of gift stores. And so people viewed them as a kind of collector's item.
They became super, super popular as the nineties went on, and then pretty much 2000 on the dot, this huge popular secondary market crashed. And as far as the general public is concerned, they're never heard from again. Although, it's not quite true. There was this kind of myth that spread that they were really valuable. Oh, if your mom…
Sarah: Loves you.
Jamie: Puts your family into debt and loves you and buys all these beanie babies, she's going to be able to send you to college by reselling them on eBay later.
Sarah: What a wonderful dream. Of course we believed that. It's something that normally only adult men get to do when it's available to little kids.
Jamie: Exactly. So you remember speculating about Beanie Babies as a kid. Do you ever remember playing with one?
Sarah: No.
Jamie: I don't think kids played with Beanie Babies. They didn’t.
Sarah: Yeah, and that's the thing. And I was also a kid who wasn't allowed to have candy when I was little, so when candy became available to me, it just tasted too sweet. It was too much. But the point is that when I was a kid, I would come home with my Halloween candy and I would eat three pieces of candy, and then I would count the rest of them and arrange them by type and arrange them by color and just like revel in this commodity that I had. So by the time Beanie Babies came around, I was just like, alright, no fucking around with these Beanie Babies. We're going to put the little acrylic tag protectors on the tags. I had the little acrylic boxes for the bears.
Jamie: Yep. The plastic boxes. So much waste associated with Beanie Babies.
Sarah: Yes. So much plastic in addition to the beanies themselves. And so I had this feeling that it would be really foolish to play with a beanie. And I think actually the first two beanies I got, I cut the tags off and treated them as toys. And then I was like, ugh, what a foolish child I was. Now I'm eight and I would never do such a thing. In retrospect, it's chilling to think about how Scrooge McDuck-like my behavior became around them.
Jamie: Should I get into the story of Beanie Babies?
Sarah: Yeah. I feel like we've established what they are. They're filled with little plastic beans, I guess, that's why they're called that.
Jamie: Yeah, PVC pellets.
Sarah: Yeah. I guess they couldn't call them ‘pellet pals’. That doesn't have quite a ring to it. They're like hacky sacks with features.
Jamie: Yeah! They're little anthropomorphized hacky sacks. They have these iconic little, if you don't remember them, they have these little red heart-shaped tags that say ‘Ty’, and there's a little poem on the inside of every Beanie Baby.
The man who starts the business is named Ty, which I think a lot of people don't know that the little heart shaped tag that says ‘Ty’, that's just the name of the guy who started the company.
Sarah: I remember this being very confusing. And I and a bunch of other kids who I knew believed that it was a copyright logo. That there's TM, so there's obviously also TY. That was what we worked it out to.
Jamie: So it’s just a guy named Ty Warner.
Sarah: This was also confusing because I remember being like Time Warner bought AOL, a very relevant thing to my life. But Ty Warner, they must be connected. I think when you're a kid, you just think that names that sound similar must be related. And I think that people involved in QAnon really continue that trend
Jamie: But then every so often it's true. Like the Skarsgaard’s. We're like, wait, Pennywise is related to one of the potential dads from Mamma Mia? It's all connected. So Ty Warner is the guy who becomes a billionaire off of this company, is still alive, hasn't given an interview since 1996.
Sarah: King.
Jamie: But to get there, in contrast to billionaires who shall not be named, he made a kind of intelligent choice, which was that when Beanie Babies became successful, he self-mythologized in a couple of interviews and then never said anything again.
Sarah: That is smart.
Jamie: And just counted on being powerful enough that his employees would never really contest this kind of false narrative he introduced.
Sarah: Wouldn't it be great if billionaires today weren't so obsessed with saying shit all the time? Now people are like, “I'm a billionaire so people have to listen to me every day.” And it's like, what about being a quiet billionaire?
Jamie: Quiet billionaires get the most evil done.
Sarah: Right! They do. They really do.
Jamie: It has worked out great for Ty, but it's wild that he's quiet because he's such a colorful character. So the Ty version of his childhood is that he grew up pretty low income in the Chicago area. The truth is, he grew up in a pretty upper middle-class family. He lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, he was fine.
Sarah: One of those poor kids who lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright. I get it could happen, theoretically. Hard to imagine, though.
Jamie: The Frank Lloyd Wright Orphanage. No. He did have a difficult childhood. His mom struggled a lot with mental illness. And there was a lot of, I think, emotional and physical violence in the house. Because of that, his father was stepping out on his mom, just doing all this… Things were challenging in the Frank Lloyd Wright house is, I guess, what I'm saying.
But Ty's father is a toy salesman, he's very nepotism-ed into the toy business. Ty's father works for this company called Dakin, which has a fascinating history all its own. It started as a gun import company and they eventually got around to selling plush toys exclusively.
Sarah: That's fascinating.
Jamie: This is in the 1950s and 1960’s as Ty is growing up. And at the time they were most famous for the Dakin bear, which is like this teddy bear. Ty is said to be an awkward teenager, not particularly good at stuff. But when he graduates high school, he moves to LA briefly to try and become an actor. It doesn't work out. He moves back to Illinois. Basically a lot of false starts, and then he is like, all right fine, I will ask my dad for a job at Dakin Toys. Ty was bad at most things, but he was like a really good salesman.
Sarah: Like Michael Scott.
Jamie: Exactly. Exactly. Kind of a weird guy. He also has a difficult relationship with his dad. It's rumored that he and his dad dated the same women at the same time.
Sarah: That's so odd.
Jamie: It’s just a very kind of complicated upbringing. But eventually he gets a job at Dakin and he's really good at it right away. This man knows how to sell a plush. And this man also knows how to really put off everybody he comes into contact with, in spite of that. Everyone who works with Ty doesn't like him. There's a lot of accounts of people just being like, he just was like a really hubris-y guy. He thought he knew better than everybody. He has this very new money vibe about him where the second the check hit, he bought a pink car and was wearing a pink velour suit, high heeled platforms, and was going to work at a toy company holding a cane.
Sarah: Wow. So he went like Full Willy Wonka. Willy Wonka/Trisha Paytas.
Jamie: One of the most cursed combinations you could possibly imagine.
Sarah: Really unpredictable host.
Jamie: Eventually, he does so well there, but always disagrees with people that he works with. So what he starts to do is start to build a company on the side. He's like, okay, I'm going to make all the money I can at Dakin and then fuck off and start my own company.
So Ty is starting this side business, he's starting his own side hustle in the early eighties with the intention being he's going to start his own company and bail. Dakin becomes suspicious of this, and they have a PI follow him around for months to build the case against Ty Warner. Because everyone hates him so much at work that they're like, if we build a strong enough case, we could just fire him. Because he's their number one salesman but he's despised. He has a Gru issue in that way. He's a bit of a Despicable Me.
Sarah: But he has yet to manufacture his minions, so it's rough.
Jamie: The minions really turn on him, and rightfully so. He loses this job at Dakin and has these kind of lost years. His relationship with his dad is still bad. He's now in his early thirties.
Sarah: These are like Shakespeare's lost years.
Jamie: And like Shakespeare, he makes a huge comeback. But he has these lost years. He tries to start all these companies that fail. According to him - and this is you can't really dispute this, and I don't really want it to be disputed because it's funny to me - he says he has this vision of a Dakin bear, a life-sized Dakin bear, coming to his window and telling him, “Ty, you got to go back into plush.” I love this story so much. The gall to tell me that a six-foot-tall stuffed bear came to his house and was like, “Ty, you have to exploit workers.”
Sarah: After the spirit of Plush Past comes to tell him that he must change his ways.
Jamie: And at this point, he’s in his early eighties. He's in his mid to late thirties. He's a bit of a late bloomer, that Ty Warner, which I think is a fun aspect of his persona. He decides he wants to start a plush business. He does not have startup money. So what he does is he goes to this woman, Patricia Roach. She's a local woman that he's gotten to know. She worked at the local gas station, and they just became friends. He was a loner who didn't get along with a lot of people. Patricia was in a bad marriage, and they just started hanging out and they were friends.
So Ty goes to Patty, that's some foreshadowing for all you Beanie Baby heads out there. But Ty goes to Patty and is like, I had this visitation from this big old bear, and I have to start a company, do you want to start it with me? And it's disputed of was she a co-founder? Was she the first employee? This becomes a big legal issue later. But basically he's like, oh, start a toy company with me. And she's like, I don't know anything about toys. And he is like ah, whatever.
My read of that is like Patty, she's described in the book as quote, “looking and acting like Liza Minnelli”. So it seems like Ty is constantly trying to present charismatic, but Patty was born with it, she's got a star persona.
Sarah: I wish I had a Liza Minelli impression. I really don’t.
Jamie: I can't go on the record with whatever would come out of my mouth.
Sarah: I know.
Jamie: But the way that they originally bonded was she was taking classes at community college, and she would let Ty come to the library with her. Because Ty was trying to research affordable ways to manufacture pluses using factories in Asia.
Sarah: These were the salad days.
Jamie: Already he's thinking diabolically.
Sarah: Yeah. And this is America before NAFTA, right? When it was more thinkable than it would become that you could actually manufacture a product domestically.
Jamie: Right. Ty’s an early pusher of outsourcing that work to, I think it was mostly Korea, where Beanie Babies were manufactured. Still, the problem is how do you get the startup money to start Beanie Babies? Well, here's what you do. Your dad dies. Once again, Ty, absolute villain, his dad dies. He doesn't tell his sister for five days.
Sarah: What! That's so many days!
Jamie: So what he does is by the time Joy gets home and finds out her dad has died, Ty has cleared out the Frank Lloyd Wright house of all the antiques. Later on in his mythology era, he will claim to have inherited $50,000. It was closer to $200,000 plus whatever he made on those antiques. And this is in 1983 money. So all of a sudden he has a pretty significant runway to start this company with Patty. And he does.
So he and Patty are the only ones working together for a while. They're making these, and I really want one someday, they make these collectible cats. And Ty is really obsessive about how his toys are designed and he's also really fixated on this is a big metaphor for something, but I have to continue on with my life. But he's really fixated on eye placement on stuffed animals. He's very fixated on that. And he is like, it needs to feel like it's looking at you. He would go with Patty in huge velour suits and feather boas and shit like that, and would carefully pose his cats.
Sarah: I do love that if you're going to be evil…
Jamie: Do it.
Sarah: Capitalistic in the worst way. Yeah, you should at least love the thing that you make and care about it and be particular about it and believe in your product, if all your means of execution are terrible. At least you have something that makes you feel like a human being or act like one a little bit.
Jamie: He's like a very compelling figure I really love. But he's also evil. He would hire a one-day contractor to help run a stall with him at a toy convention, and then he would yell at them because you're sweating on the toys, get the fuck outta here. And he was mean. He has an ego issue. The logo's literally his name in a heart. And there's like a fun story about Russ, Russ Berry of Trolls fame.
Sarah: Who invented the Trolls, the treasure Trolls?
Jamie: Yes. Yet another toy tycoon that named his company just his first name.
Sarah: Are Treasure Trolls still around? Is this something that a child today would know? Is Gen Z troll literate? Is this my New York Times op-ed?
Jamie: The Trolls have evolved. They make kids movies about them now.
Sarah: Oh my God. Of course. Yeah. The Trolls are huge. They're voiced by Anna Kendrick now. How did that happen, the Trolls.
Jamie: They got the Kendrick bump, but they look so different. The company kind of coasts along for a couple years. It's doing pretty well, and he and Patty get into a relationship pretty quickly after the company starts.
Sarah: Because it is so romantic to try and rope your workers together.
Jamie: Yeah. She says for the book, she says it's quote “two neurotics feeding off of each other's insecurities”. They were doing pretty well. But the Beanie Babies themselves don't come into play until 1993, so they've already been around for seven years before the Beanie Babies come along.
And Ty and Patricia's relationship romantically is beyond repair. He is, she alleges in this book, very abusive towards her. There are pretty brutal stories about that in that book, as well as she's not paid as if she has co-founded this company with Ty, which is a repeated pattern of behavior. In ‘92, which is one of the final blows to their relationship, she used to make a percentage of sales, which meant she would've been entitled to something around $200,000. Ty takes her, his girlfriend of five plus years at this point, into his office and is like, “Great news, I'm going to offer you a salary now, it's $50,000”. And you're just not going to want to say that to Liza Minnelli, because she's not going to take it well.
Sarah: She's going to dance right over to you and tell you what for.
Jamie: But he won't budge on that. And so she's on top of his possessiveness, and he would have her stalked and all this stuff. He also was not compensating her even remotely fairly. And so she bails on the relationship but stays with the company.
Sarah: Sure. That'll work out.
Jamie: She starts dating a new guy and they go on a vacation to Cancun, and Ty shows up in Cancun. He was bad to her in every conceivable way. So in early ‘93, Patty says after the Cancun incident she's like, “I need to leave this company.” Which also sucks for her because she didn't do anything wrong. He became too abusive for her to stay at her job that she was really good at and was already underpaid at.
Sarah: This is another way that women lose money. I feel like we make a big deal about for every dollar a man makes, figure, which is important, but there's so many other ways to express that. And one is just how much money and how many assets you forfeit because you just have to leave an unsafe situation.
Jamie: Right. I've fortunately, not to this degree, but it's like I've left jobs because you're like, this guy is never going to get fired, he's un-fireable, and he is horrible to me. So now I can't work on, insert thing.
Sarah: Now I can't get my beanie millions when the beanie ship comes in. It's just over now by default.
Jamie: Right. Because it sounds like very much they were doing equal work as executives, if not a bit in her favor. But anyways, she leaves and starts selling insurance in the early nineties. She will be back. Ty, in 1993, creates the first Beanie Baby. It's Legs. Here he is.
Sarah: Hi, Legs.
Jamie: He's a little frog. Oh, he is so damn cute. And we love Legs.
Sarah: He's so cute.
Jamie: He's got absolutely no mouth. They debuted with 12 Beanie Babies. Legs the frog, Squealer the pig, Brownie the bear, Flash the dolphin, Splash the whale, Patty the platypus, Chocolate the moose, Spot the dog, and Pinchers the lobster.
Now here's the thing about Patty, the Platypus. It is a direct attack on Patricia Roach. He truly is just a diabolical individual, where even after she has left the company, he names Patty the Platypus - a magenta platypus character - after Patty. There's a poem inside that is also a direct assault on her. It's this: “Ran into Patty one day while walking. Believe me, she wouldn't stop talking. Listened and listened to her speak. That would explain her extra-large beak.” Evil. Ty wrote that one.
Sarah: It's incredible that someone managed to slander their ex, who they were extremely abusive towards, via a child's toy.
Jamie: That becomes extremely popular. It's awful. However, the Beanie Babies are not very popular right away. Really all you need to know about the beginnings is that Ty's business model, as we were talking about before, he only sells them in small gift shops. He wants to create this feeling of exclusiveness and specialness and scarcity. And so the rules are if you are selling Beanie Babies, they have to be displayed, because he thinks it needs to feel like it's looking at you.
Sarah: He has a real thing for being watched by toys.
Jamie: So he only sells to small places. And it doesn't take off for a while. This is where the second undersung Beanie Babies iconic woman comes into play. Lena Travetti, she is number 12. And what that means is she's the 12th Ty employee ever. I think she's a student at DePaul, because this is all happening in the Chicago area still. But she's hired when she's 19 as a telemarketer, she's hired at $12 an hour. But the company is so small and she's their resident young person. Have you ever been a resident young person at someone's company? It kind of rocks, but it's horrible.
Sarah: I feel like I've been that. Not at someone's company, but in the context of teaching sometimes, where I started teaching in grad school and I had gone to grad school straight after college. So there were a lot of people who were actual adults who were in my cohort with me, and they were teaching students who were younger than them. And I was teaching students who were essentially my age. And in a company, I feel like this would be you're in the middle between the company and the demographic that you're trying to reach.
Jamie: Yeah. I had similar experiences at an improv theater in my early twenties. Lena Travetti filled that role at Ty in the early years. And she's really excited when Ty likes her ideas that have nothing to do with telemarketing. She gets really into it. So even though she's technically a telemarketer, she starts throwing out ideas. Most of which become very successful and associated with the brand forever, including the poems in the tags. That's a Lena Travetti original. She proposed that they add them. Ty said, that's an amazing idea, can you write them for all 80 Beanie Babies by tomorrow? And she does. She does it. She's a legend. She's our generation's Browning, Plath, Angelou. She belongs among the greats.
Sarah: I loved those little poems when I was a kid. And I love knowing that many of them were churned out in one night by a very overworked employee.
Jamie: A college student. Ah, yeah. Move over Zuckerberg, you god damned loser. People were doing more important things like late night chugging, probably Mountain Dew Fruitcake.
Sarah: You're writing code. And she was writing Os.
Jamie: Ooh, I felt that in my stomach. That was awesome. So she brings that idea and that's immediately successful. She's also the first person to say hey, we should start a website for the Beanie Babies.
Sarah: Oh, great. When everybody's like, “Meh, websites.”
Jamie: Exactly, the internet is a fad. And Lena is like, let's just hire my brother who's also a college student. We'll make it together. We'll show you. And so they make this incredible, I'll send you the link. It's still available on the way back machine. But like they make this incredible website that is of course all in Comic Sans.
She also creates the website, which becomes very successful and becomes an amazing tool for Ty Warner to never have to talk to his customer base again. Because what they do, and this is another Lena original idea, she should be a billionaire. No one should be a billionaire, but like she should. Because Ty does not want to make any public appearances, doesn't even want to speak to his customer base directly. So they create this concept called the Info Beanie. The Beanie Babies talk to the customers, and this is wildly successful. On the website, they have the Beanie Babies keep daily diaries for some reason, that are also posted to the website so that you have to keep going back.
Sarah: If you were checking a website daily in 1996, it was like, you had to put some muscle into it. You had to log on, which took a good five minutes. And then each page had to load for a while for you to get to like the beanie diary that you wanted to read. And so it's like a good 15 minutes of effort.
Jamie: And the Naperville mommies are happy to do it. So the way that Beanie Babies become popular, they're out for a couple years, they're moderately successful. The company is doing pretty good. And in 1995, so a couple years after, basically they blew up in the holiday season between ‘95 and ‘96. And once it's ‘96, there's no looking back baby.
The series of moms, some are working moms, some are stay-at-home moms, that discover Beanie Babies in late 1995. And because the nineties was already a hot time to be a collector in general, these kind of upper middle-class women get really into collecting all of the Beanie Babies because at that time there were few enough of them that it was possible to do.
Sarah: And it's shopping, which can become drudgery when you have to do it for your family all the time. But in this really exciting way that has a lot of adrenaline and dopamine built in, it's like sport shopping.
Jamie: And so it's like at this time in ‘95, the idea that Beanie Babies could pay for college did not yet exist. It exists because these women started to buy them up and were trying to build, it was like a rival group of five or six moms that all lived in the same area that started this whole secondary market. One of them happens to write for People magazine freelance, it gets a mention in People magazine. And so it builds really significantly, really quickly.
I don't know. It wasn't Ty Warner's idea. He later claims it was his idea, but he just was so fixated on the eyes being very particular. There would often be two or three different versions of the same stuffed animal because Ty was like, ah, the eyes are in the wrong place. Would call up the manufacturer in Korea and be like, “Burn them all. I need the eyes closer” or further away.
Sarah: Oh, it's a massacre.
Jamie: And so if you had the one with the eyes the wrong way, all of a sudden the moms are like, “Hey, that's more valuable.” They lit the rest of them on fire. So because he's such a Willy Wonka fucking weirdo, he accidentally creates rare products. And then when they run out of product on this Beanie Baby called Lovey the Lamb in ‘95, instead of admitting that he just didn't order enough, he's like, “Lovey is retired now”. So now there's this concept of a Beanie Baby being retired. You have to buy it right away, or it'll disappear.
Sarah: I like that he seems to have blundered into making his product more valuable through sheer ineptness.
Jamie: But then later he is like, and that was all part of the plan. Okay, so now we're in like ‘96, ’97, there's a steady uptick in interest in Beanie Babies. It starts in the Midwest and slowly expands, but class-wise, it stays basically in the middle to upper-middle class. No one really has the time or money to be doing this.
But this is also around the time where the next woman in Ty's life enters. He meets a woman named Faith McGowen, who was hired, she's a single mom of two daughters. She's 14 years younger than him, and he hires her to adjust the light fixtures in his McMansion. She comes over to his house hired to install these light fixtures, and he's just like giving her so much grief about it and being horrible, because he is horrible. And then at the end it's, “Do you want to go to a baseball game? I feel that we've really hit it off.”
Sarah: Oh my God. Ah. Ah.
Jamie: And she's like, “No thank you.” And then he has her car blocked into his driveway until she agrees to go on a date with him.
Sarah: This is weirdly the kind of story that inner culture can be passed off as like the successful start to a loving courtship, which just is very worrying.
Jamie: Exactly. So Faith McGowen, she passed away I think close to 10 years ago now, but she had an unpublished memoir that is quoted in this book. So I just want to give a quick quote about their first date from her unpublished memoir.
“He talked about his sexually explicit references, speaking about Patty, his cosmetic surgeries, and his lifestyle. It warned that this man was very different, but I was struck by the drama he created and his personal flair. His unique presence and obvious intelligence started to suck me into his drama almost as if I was auditioning for a part.”
So he is like radically honest, but also is constantly talking shit about Patricia. Even though she's no longer in his life, he stays fixated on her for years. And a lot of people are clowning him for this. I think that there's far better things to clown on Ty Warner for it, but he did start getting a lot of cosmetic surgery pretty early into becoming wealthy. And some were better than others, and you can just Google him and form your own opinion. Sort of like Patty, a similar pattern develops with Faith. Faith never works for the company. I think Ty decides I'm never going to let a woman work with me in an official capacity again.
Sarah: Yeah. I'm never going to let a woman get close to equity.
Jamie: He's never been married in spite of the fact that he had decades long relationships with women, and I do think it's the financial thing. But for Faith, he's very quick to get people to be stuck with him, but never financially independent. Which is like,classic abuser shit to do.
He basically gets her fired from her job because he calls her and he is like, “You have to demand a gigantic raise or walk, and I won't respect you if you don't.” She works at a lighting fixture company, they're not going to give her a $50,000 raise. And so all of a sudden Faith is out of a job and she and her daughters move into Ty's McMansion where they stay for years.
Sarah: Great. And now she has to adjust the lighting for free.
Jamie: Exactly. And she gives Ty a lot of suggestions about specific Beanie Babies, about the business. There's a wild anecdote about her daughter, who was like nine at the time. Ty was trying to make a Beanie Baby that was a ghost but couldn't figure out the design. And he's like beside himself in the McMansion. He's like, I can't make a Beanie Baby ghost. And then his nine-year-old sort of stepdaughter is like, what if you did this? And she draws a prototype that he is like, oh, that would actually work. And so she designs this Beanie Baby. Originally, he credits her on the tag. Later he says, “Remove the credit, it was my idea.” He's stealing an idea from a nine-year-old girl. He's evil.
Sarah: Yeah. Wait, and what Beanie Baby is this? Is there a ghost Beanie Baby?
Jamie: The Beanie Baby's name is Spook. Which, yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. Not a thoughtful Beanie Baby name or either.
Jamie: No. They're all pretty basic and not all of them age particularly well.
Sarah: It's like stealing credit from a nine-year-old is like literally something a villain in a Disney Channel original movie would do. And also, just negotiate a little deal with her and give her 5% and then start a college fund and that'll be great. And you'll be fine.
Jamie: In 1996. Beanie Babies are starting to do really well. They're selling well. The secondary market is forming, and Ty decides that he wants Patty involved in the company. Again, my read of the situation is he just wants to be in control of these women at all times. And so he's okay, let's bring Patty back in. Maybe it wasn't fair the way she was cut out. And he proposes that she come back to the company, comes back to Ty but to run Ty UK. So basically, he is, “You're hired again, but I'm shipping you away from me.” And she, Liza Minnelli, is out. And she says, how the hell far away do you want me to go, Ty? Or whatever.
Sarah: Oh, good.
Jamie: But she came back because she liked working in plush, she just hated Ty. So she's like, all right, I'll move to London. And so she's back in the company.
Sarah: This is such a great story because we all understand the product. It's not the Murdoch’s or something where you like, get the day to day.
Jamie: It’s truly just bean bag toys. So now we're getting into 1998. What is happening in the meantime is like the secondary market has formed. There's now a greater demand for Beanie Babies. It's in the news that moms are showing up with their kids to like Hallmark stores. They're lining up around the corner. It's like the Harry Potter books shit like that. Everyone is so amped on them. It's made its way across the country. There are all of these demands towards Ty of like you have to do some licensing. But he hates licensing, he won't do it. You've got to make a deal with Walmart or sell him to a big store. But he doesn't like big stores, so he won't do it.
They want him to make a cartoon. He's like, no. In a way that I think actually did serve the business for a long time, he only wants to sell bean bags and retire them. And now there's the website. And so there's people logging into dial up internet multiple times a day to see what the info beanie has to say about new releases or maybe about just hanging out. It depends. Lena Travetti is updating the website between classes. She's still in college. She's still making $12 an hour.
Sarah: Lena! No!
Jamie: Lena gets royally fucked. It makes me so mad. Speaking class-wise, this was fairly contained for a long time. It basically sticks in the middle and upper middle class, but now everyone has heard of Beanie Babies and there's a demand across class lines to have them. Everyone wants to have them. And so there's this increasing pressure on Ty Warner to make them available to everybody. In the meantime, we have the Neighborville neighborhood moms. At this point there is talk that Beanie Babies are becoming really valuable. There's this story about a specific elephant beanie named Peanut.
Sarah: Yes. I remember this beanie from my beanie book.
Jamie: Kind of the first virally, valuable beanie baby because it came in dark blue, but then they made it light blue and if you had a dark blue Peanut, oh baby, you're getting a jet ski or whatever. The reason that this information that, if you get enough beanie babies Jamie's mom, you will be able to retire and send your children to college, is because the Naperville moms like this group of five or six women, they do become pretty wealthy off of it. But only because they were the first to it and they all developed these different ways of monetizing it.
Sarah: It also sounds a little bit like LuLaRoe based on that, where it's like the way to win at the game is to be one of the first eight people who hears about it. And then everyone else is screwed and you just buy a bunch of shit, and then you don't know why.
Jamie: Exactly. And so some of them were making money on actually reselling Beanie Babies. Beanie Babies have a huge role in the success of eBay, because eBay was launched in ’95. And in the early years of eBay, 1 in 10 sales on eBay were Beanie Babies.
Sarah: Oh my God. They're like what Kanye was to Adidas.
Jamie: Yeah. And also experienced a significant fall from grace, and rightfully so. But yeah, some of them are selling on eBay and that's how you get these juiced up valuation prices. Where I feel like the common misunderstanding is like, this Beanie Baby is worth $300. When it's like, no, someone just listed it for $300. Did anyone buy it? I feel like that is often confused.
And this is mostly women that were developing those price guides that you were talking about. And Ty does not make money off of that, the moms do. And so there develops this upset and litigiousness between Ty and the moms. The ironic part being that the only reason his product is successful is because of them, but now they're making a bunch of money off the side.
There's an example of this woman named Mary Beth Sobolewski. She started this magazine called Mary Beth's Beanie World, that at its peak was circulating to the tune of 1 million copies a month.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Jamie: It was really big. And so Ty slaps her with a lawsuit. He says, knock it off, Mary Beth. He was, I guess, within his rights to do it, but what horrible PR. So when Mary Beth, he feels, becomes a little too wealthy off of promoting his products he slaps her with a lawsuit. She has to change the name of the magazine to Mary Beth's Bean Bag World.
Sarah: Oh, whatever. And then it just makes it sound like it's for cornhole enthusiasts and, you know, who benefits really?
Jamie: I wish her the best. The beginning of the end, in my opinion. Though your mileage may vary, is in 1997 at the peak of beanie baby demand. Ty capitulates and agrees to do the teeny beanie promotion with McDonald's. Now this is the first time that Beanie Babies have been made available to everybody. Now anyone who can afford a Happy Meal can have a Beanie Baby. If you watch the news broadcast of the first teeny beanie release, it is genuinely terrifying. I'm thankful to have no memory of this happening. Honestly, not quite affirming memories, but oh my God, I know my mom did it. She was into it.
Sarah: She was like getting trampled in a McDonald's.
Jamie: Mobs of terrible haircuts storming the Bastille to… Either way, okay, so teeny beanies come out. Now the market is absolutely flooded. They are small, they're different from regular Beanie Babies, which was done for cost and also to hopefully retain the original value of regular beanies. But now that Beanie Babies are accessible across class lines, everybody is alright, you know what? I'll start collecting Beanie Babies as well. If anyone was on the fence, teeny beanies made it so that everyone wanted one.
Sarah: Did they exist outside of McDonald's or was it limited, we're going to have the teeny beanie Happy Meals briefly and then they're gone? How did that work?
Jamie: So it is still the Ty Warner ethos of creating as much scarcity as he can. And at McDonald's, you have to have it at McDonald's, they're only available for a limited time. So if you were a seasoned beanie mom at this point, you're like, okay, so I have to drive to 50 McDonald's. There are local news interviews with kids who are like, I feel sick. My mom just bought 40 Happy Meals and I feel fucking sick.
There's news footage from a helicopter of a McDonald's truck, I guess accidentally, a couple hundred teeny beanies fell off in the middle of the highway. And it's helicopter footage of moms stopping in the middle of the highway and sending their children into five lane traffic to get teeny beanies. It was a big deal. It is a whole thing. You can feel whatever way about it.
Sarah: This is the sort of Karen origin story in 1997, send child into traffic.
Jamie: Worth it. And also at this point, they're launching new Beanie Babies so frequently that completionists kind of start to give up because they're like, there's no way I could possibly have every single Beanie Baby. It was easy to collect when there's 12 now there's at least a hundred, probably a couple hundred.
Sarah: It's like the Robert Altman movies. You're like eh, whatever.
Jamie: You're like, I'm sure some of these are good. But it's none of my business. But before that happens, they peak in ‘98, ‘99. And that brings us back to the story of one Ty Warner. They've made so much fucking money. He's hired all these people. And Christmas Eve 1998, an iconic day, in the nicest thing I've ever heard of him doing, he gives everyone a holiday bonus of their salary. Which is cool of him to do and also just an example of how much money they were making in 1998.
Sarah: Also, maybe a Dakin bear wearing a grim reaper's robe showed up to him in a dream and told him he'd be dead by next Christmas if he wasn't more generous.
Jamie: They really Scrooged him. But meanwhile, in his personal life, Patty and Faith have been pitted against each other in Ty's life for years now. On this same day, the same day of the party, the double your salary party, Faith finds out that Ty is cheating on her with Patty at a hotel nearby and Ty lies about it. Patty yells at Faith and punches Ty in the face. I mean because Faith, for someone who is very bullied into this relationship, is faithful to him the whole time. And he strung her along for years being like, we just need to get to this place with the business and then we're going to get married and you will be financially secure. They never get married.
Sarah: That also happened with Scrooge. That's what that whole sad song in the middle of the Muppet Christmas parallel is about. There are really a lot of parallels.
Jamie: Okay. So Faith does make at least one effort to get a formal title at the company because she's doing so much. It's unclear exactly what she was doing, but she was certainly giving constant creative input to Ty, who's always having a meltdown about something creative. He says, all you did was pick colors, fuck off. And so she never gets a formal title.
Eventually, I believe it is her who leaves him, and he sets her up in a Santa Barbara McMansion and tells her to go away. But she is really sad, and she dies still loving him. It really sucks and it makes me very sad. And Faith is awesome. One thing she says about Ty in her unpublished memoir is, “Nothing is ever enough, and nothing is ever good enough, because Ty's soul is empty.”
And then Patty, while she is more of a brassy broad, she says about Ty, “The hardest part of having a relationship with Ty is realizing that he never cared about you.”
Sarah: Oh, God. I feel like that's like the one size fits all. Horrible billionaire bio too, where it's just so predictable that you just have to amass as much as possible, amass power, amass capital, and take all the credit for it. And also, often rely on the unpaid labor of women, because that's just like a thing that we do culturally that naturally carries over into this.
Jamie: Yeah. So if they peak in ‘’98, 99 sort of represents this sudden kind of not quite free fall that happens in 2000. But there's all of a sudden doubt, maybe we're not sending our children to college off of beanie babies. They're losing their retail value or resale value. Because they always cost $5 to $6 at stores. The price never really increases. It's the resale values that are constantly fluctuating. So it's a combination of the market being too flooded, people can't keep up with collecting and Ty is getting known to be so litigious that like the company doesn't have an amazing reputation because he sues Mary Beth. People don't like that. He sues a company called Holy Bears. He sues a Jesus Beanie baby rip-off.
Sarah: And it's do you really think that they're like infringing on your prophets at the stage in the game?
Jamie: It looks better to say nothing. They continue to do the teeny beanie promotions annually, which are successful, but like again, it's peaked, there's really nowhere to go from here. Sales in ‘98 are $1.4 billion. Ty is the only shareholder, so he makes $73 million. It's absurd. But by ‘99 he's trying to find a way to contain this secondary market and isn't successful at it. He tries to retire a bunch of beanie babies to spike sales. It works, but not really.
He fucks around with the website considerably to get people to try to engage more over there with the info beanies. It works, but not really. And in 1999, he realized this may not last forever. I need to start investing in other things. So what he does is he buys the Four Seasons in New York, which he owns to this day. Had Ty actually done right by Patricia or by Faith, he may not have been able to afford the Four Seasons. And so that sort of trickled down of like by fucking over various people in his life, he acquired the Four Seasons and he's currently worth over $3.4 billion.
Sarah: Because that was a good investment that he couldn't have made if he hadn’t thrown so many women off the lifeboat.
Jamie: Meanwhile, people are jumping ship at Ty Incorporated, right and left. Lena Travetti leaves because she is still paid $12 an hour. She goes to an executive and says, I want a salary of $120,000, which I think is good for her. And also, she's created so much value for this company. And they basically tell her to fuck off. And so she leaves the company and has a series of rough years. She's doing great now. She's an author of children's books. She was in the most recent Beanie Babies documentary. She doesn't seem to hold ill will towards Ty in a way that I find really stunning on her part. I would be so salty forever, but she seems like she's moved on. 99 there's a decline and Ty decides, he makes the final bad decision of the Beanie Babies craze, which is to drive up sales, he's going to say, Beanie babies are over forever. He takes a poll on the Beanie Babies website that says, do you think we should retire Beanie Babies forever? And you have to pay 50 cents to vote. He makes a bunch of money off of people just being like, we like these. It's just such a sensitive ego monster.
Sarah: Maybe he invented being scammy on social media, which, nobody needed to invent that. So it's, yeah.
Jamie: So what he does is he says he's going to retire everything basically. And the scam plan was he's going to retire the brand, which will drive up sales. Then in, early to mid 2000, he'll say, okay, we're bringing them back. And he was hoping that this would revitalize the business. Everyone at the company was like, do not do this. This is the worst idea you've ever had. And you throw pennies at toll booth workers.
Sarah: And he is like, I got this far by not listening to anyone and by believing that all the good ideas I stole from people were actually mine. So don't worry about it.
Jamie: Yeah, I think I know what I'm doing, thanks. We're going to say that all the Beaning babies are going to be retired, and then a couple weeks later we're going to say, just kidding. Thanks for the sales. They're back.
Sarah: Consumers do love to be lied to their faces in a way they're very aware of. We just love it.
Jamie: So he and Faith are still together at this time. And he goes to Faith saying, “I need to design the final Beanie Baby.” And that's where, our friend, the end comes.
Sarah: You just whipped him into frame in an amazing way.
Jamie: For our listeners, the end is the classic bear. It is pitch black. It's ominous. And it's got a little firework on his chest, and it says, “The End”.
Sarah: The idea of a little stuffed bear whose name is The End, is just very horror-y to me.
Jamie: So it is very sinister, I think in an appropriate close to the decade. Ty says that Beanie Babies are ending December 31st 1999.
Sarah: Along with the world.
Jamie: Exactly. Something just to give, they're like, and also this. But Faith writes the first draft of the poem inside of the End. I think hers is superior. “Are they a fad? Were they a trend? Or were they a way to show love to a friend? Wishes for happiness Ty continues to send from the beginning to whenever, the end.” Ty says, fuck that poem, and he writes this. He says, “All good things come to an end. It's been fun for everyone. Peace and hope are never gone. Love you all and say so long.” Faith’s was so much better.
Sarah: It was. Ty has no dimension. This is a man who is not in touch with his emotions.
Jamie: I feel like he just didn't want it to be called a fad canonically. So we have the End. And also, just for your reference, I had to take off my plastic tag holder to read that poem to you, so you're welcome. It just lost serious resale value. You know that is the story of the fad. He does, according to plan, he says the beanies are back in early 2000. Everyone's pissed off about it, like you were saying. They feel lied to. Sales go way, way down, and it's bad. And the company takes a turn from there. He tries to launch a few new lines hoping that they'll be as successful. My favorite of which, I had some of these, are called the Beanie Kids. Feedback on the Beanie Kids is, they look so scary.
Sarah: So it's like an actual human in beanie form.
Jamie: So that doesn't work. Ty is sending off his employees to go to these, they're still only sold in these small stores, and they start to take on these mafia style intimidation tactics that don't work. Where they're like, the stores are like, oh, we just want the Beanie Babies. We don't actually want the Beanie Kids. And they're like, you're going to want to buy some of these Beanie Kids. These Beanie Babies could just go away at any second. Intimidating the manager of the Hallmark Store.
Sarah: Either you buy these Beanie Kids, or your brains will be splattered across that contract. How about that?
Jamie: Ty basically becomes a full-time hotelier now. He and Faith separate at some point, Mary Beth's Bean Bag World goes under in ‘01, along with life as we knew it. And Shrek is released.
Sarah: The Target demo moves onto the Delia’s catalog,
Jamie: People move on from Beanie Babies, but the company stays afloat enough. Ty does everything he says he would never do. In that Beanie Babies, the current Beanie Baby iteration, which are called Beanie Boos. Now you can get Ty products literally anywhere. If you've seen, it's one of those little stuffed animals with the big old eyes. They're very cute. But that's like the Beanie Babies Company. It's what they do now. You can get them literally anywhere. So they're not exclusive anymore. They also do licensing. You can get Paw Patrol, beanie Babies.
So ultimately, he did go down the Dakin Garfield route. Patty eventually leaves the company and basically makes Ty agree to never speak to her again. She suffered a lot of abuse under him and was screwed over financially quite a bit, but I do appreciate that it seems like she ended that on her terms. They get into it in the book, but basically she makes Ty sign something to say, leave me alone.
Sarah: Love it.
Jamie: And I believe that she is still alive and well. Ty is sued or he has to go to court in 2013 because he's kept over a hundred million in a Swiss bank account. He's taken to court, but they're like, he could spend as much as five years in prison. He gets two years of probation based on the charitable donations he made over the years and also the fact that he was humiliated in the press, so he doesn't have to go to jail. It makes no sense.
Sarah: I love how if you're super rich, they're like you experienced embarrassment, so that's penalty enough, really. And it's like, yeah, only rich people suffer ill effects from being charged with a crime. Everyone else just has a normal time with that. It's easier if you have no money.
Jamie: So these days Ty is 78 years old. He still owns the Four Seasons. But I wanted to leave it with Joy Warner, who is his sister. They were never close. Ty was never close with really anyone in his family. Joy, in spite of the fact that she lives in a pretty remote area and runs a massage parlor and has a lot of dogs. I think she lives on a ranch. Ty, even though he is a billionaire, has previously refused to help pay for surgeries that she's needed. He's a very mean person. However, because Ty was so withholding and shitty and evil to women throughout his entire life, in a little twist of poetic irony, when he dies his sister Joy will inherit $3.4 billion.
Sarah: Yes. Because that's what happens if you never get married or create heirs, Ty!
Jamie: Sorry, Ty. And that is the story of Beanie Babies, Sarah Marshall. Oh my God. Actually we didn't even talk about the Princess Diana Beanie Babies. Did you have one of those?
Sarah: Yes, I had it in an acrylic clear box, which I now feel sad about, thinking about my poor little purple Princess Diana Commemorative Bear, which from an adult perspective seems rather ghoulish to me to do that.
Jamie: I agree.
Sarah: To never have been played with. So sad.
Jamie: They gave the money to what, whatever the official charitable foundation for Princess Diana was, but even so I'm like, no, I think that was fucked up.
Sarah: It's a bit intense. Yeah. If you have a perfectly preserved for history Beanie Baby somewhere still in a closet, maybe take it out and play with it and it can fulfill its toy purpose. That's my dream. And also for people to be adequately compensated for their labor. That's my other one.
Jamie: You might as well play with your Beanie Babies because spoiler alert, that's about all they're fucking good for. They're not right with anybody.
Sarah: Thank you so much for listening to our show. Thank you so much to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, my producer, without whom the wheels of this bus would fly off and I would screech down the highway making sparks. Thank you so much again to Jamie Loftus, who is so wonderful. Thank you, Jamie, for everything you do. Thank you again for being here with us, listening, learning, talking about toys.