There were nine original Beanie Babies: Legs the Frog, Squealer the Pig, Spot the Dog, Flash the Dolphin, Splash the Whale, Chocolate the Moose, Patti the Platypus, Brownie the Bear (later renamed Cubbie), and Pinchers the Lobster (with some tags misprinted "Punchers").
[13] Around the same time, Ty, Inc. began restricting production and distribution: stores could buy only 36 of each character per month.
[8] The resulting scarcity led to a significant increase in sales, and it started the trend of collecting and reselling Beanie Babies.
[15] Ty, Inc. announced that they would stop producing Beanie Babies in December 1999, but high demand soon led them to reconsider.
This led to a criticism that the toys looked "cheap";[16] however, this set them apart from most stuffed animals on the market which could not be posed easily.
Starting in early 1996, the tags include four-line poems related to the Beanie Baby, and a date of birth for the toy.
To get small retailers to stock the product, Ty introduced Beanie Babies at the 1993 Toy Fair in New York City.
[20] Later in 1995, Ty was forced to end production on the popular toy Lovie the Lamb, owing to an issue with suppliers in China.
This news would spread via word of mouth, as motivated sellers began to stock up on Ty plush toys while they still could, thus creating a new demand for Beanie Babies.
As a result of this artificial demand, consumers began buying Beanie Babies in bulk from the Ty website to relist them on auction sites for highly inflated prices.
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".
By the time the first iteration of the Ty website was published in late 1995 (by Lina Trivedi),[4] only 1.4% of Americans were using the Internet.
As a result, hordes of consumers were visiting the Ty website to gain information about Beanie Babies, which was unprecedented for the time.
One of the largest was Mary Beth's Bean Bag World, a monthly magazine dedicated to Beanie Babies and competing plush toys.
[33][34] In the late 2000s, Beanie Babies modeled after characters from popular children's franchises by Nickelodeon, DreamWorks and Paramount began appearing.
In addition, Ty Inc. has produced Beanie Baby toys based on characters from the Disney Junior TV series Doc McStuffins, Pixar films like Cars and Finding Dory, and Marvel Comics superheroes.
Ty Inc. has also expanded their Nickelodeon Beanie Babies lineup with characters from PAW Patrol, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Peppa Pig.
In April 2020, H. Ty Warner pledged that 100% of profits from the sale of a limited edition Beanie Baby bear named "Hope" were to be donated to the United Way Worldwide COVID-19 Fund.