The great Beanie Baby bubble
by Zac Bissonnette · first published 2015
100% recommend
Why HN recommends it
Narrative history of the 1990s Beanie Baby craze, built on original reporting; readers value its colorful characters and its insight into how bubbles form and pop. A quick read for anyone curious about speculative mania.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"A bestselling journalist delivers the never-before-told story of the plush animal craze that became the tulip mania of the 1990s . In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. In just three years, collectors who saw the toys as a means of speculation made creator Ty Warner, an eccentric college dropout, a billionaire-without advertising or big-box distribution. Beanie Babies were ten percent of eBay's sales in its early days, with an average selling price of $30-six times the retail price. At the peak of the bubble in 1999, Warner reported a personal income of $662 mil
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There's a great history of this, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette. It's a quick read, almost entirely original reporting. Aside from the colorful characters, it's really compelling to see the way some individuals'…
on “The Beanie Baby Bubble of '99” ↗"The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: The Amazing Story of How America Lost Its Mind Over a Plush Toy--and the Eccentric Genius Behind It". It's a good book: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Beanie-Baby-Bubble-Toy/dp/15918...
on “Ask HN: What books for algorithmic crypto trading can you recommend?” ↗…that's a lazy answer, because it raises the question "Why, actually, was there demand for beanie babies?" It was actually a really complex and fascinating phenomenon (I recommend https://www.amazon.com/Great-Beanie-Baby-Bubble-Delusion/dp/...) from the early days of the Internet and e-commerce. Likewise with the Tulip Mania and the South Sea Bubble (which people often compare crypto to); they're a lot more complicated than…
on “Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme” ↗…Open: How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination - Elon Musk (bio by Vance) - Softwar (Larry Ellison) Related to tech, but not really tech: - The Decipherment of Linear B - Oglivy on Adviertising - The Great Beanie Baby Bubble
on “YC’s Summer Reading” ↗A good companion book might be : The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute It has a lot of insight on how bubbles can grow -- and pop.
on “Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?” ↗