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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
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THE GREAT BEANIE BABY BUBBLE
Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute
A bestselling journalist delivers the never-before-told story of the plush animal craze that became the tulip mania of the 1990s.
After the crash, investors were left in ruin. One soap opera star lost his kids’ six-figure college funds and his marriage. Products that once brought bids of $500 or more languished unsold on eBay with starting prices of $1. But it wasn’t internet stock mania or the housing bubble that ruined these investors. With his first hardcover, Zac Bissonnette tackles the astonishing rise and fall of a plush children’s toy: the Beanie Baby.
Little has been written about the Beanie Baby craze of the 1990s. A phenomenon that propelled toy mogul Ty Warner to a net worth of $5.2 billion has since left journalists and participants almost too embarrassed to address the most inane bubble of an era that was full of bubbles. But so many questions remain:
• How did Beanie Babies get so hot?
• How could a toy that was essentially lacking in innovation become such a phenomenon without any advertising or distribution through major retailers?
• Why did it crash?
• And most of all: What the hell were people thinking?
Bissonnette takes readers behind the scenes in the industry and into the homes of people who risked—and lost—everything. With the same wit and depth of research he’s shown in his previous books, he examines here what happened when millions of otherwise sane people thought that a mass-produced beanbag would be the ticket to their investment riches.
Zac Bissonnette wrote two acclaimed bestsellers before his twenty-fourth birthday: Debt-Free U and How to Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, NYTimes.com, and Mental Floss, among others, and he is the author of the humor book Good Advice from Bad People. As a contributing editor with The Antique Trader, he’s been featured as an expert in the collecting category on public radio, and he is the editor of the 2013 Warman’s Guide to Antiques & Collectibles. His 2010 story for AOL, “Kitsch and Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of Hummel Figurines,” received over a million page views.
Little has been written about the Beanie Baby craze of the 1990s. A phenomenon that propelled toy mogul Ty Warner to a net worth of $5.2 billion has since left journalists and participants almost too embarrassed to address the most inane bubble of an era that was full of bubbles. But so many questions remain:
• How did Beanie Babies get so hot?
• How could a toy that was essentially lacking in innovation become such a phenomenon without any advertising or distribution through major retailers?
• Why did it crash?
• And most of all: What the hell were people thinking?
Bissonnette takes readers behind the scenes in the industry and into the homes of people who risked—and lost—everything. With the same wit and depth of research he’s shown in his previous books, he examines here what happened when millions of otherwise sane people thought that a mass-produced beanbag would be the ticket to their investment riches.
Zac Bissonnette wrote two acclaimed bestsellers before his twenty-fourth birthday: Debt-Free U and How to Be Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking Than Your Parents. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, NYTimes.com, and Mental Floss, among others, and he is the author of the humor book Good Advice from Bad People. As a contributing editor with The Antique Trader, he’s been featured as an expert in the collecting category on public radio, and he is the editor of the 2013 Warman’s Guide to Antiques & Collectibles. His 2010 story for AOL, “Kitsch and Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of Hummel Figurines,” received over a million page views.
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Book
Published 2015-03-03 by Portfolio |
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Book
Published 2015-03-03 by Portfolio |