1993
Nine original Beanie Babies were launched in 1993: 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 tag errors with "Punchers"). They were not in factory production until 1994. Sales were slow at first to the point that by 1995 many retailers either refused to buy the products in the bundles TY offered them while others outright refused to buy them in any form The popularity soon grew however. first starting locally in Chicago before growing into a national craze.
Beanie Babies began to emerge as popular collectibles in late 1995, and became a hot toy. The company's strategy of deliberate scarcity, producing each new design in limited quantity, restricting individual store shipments to limited numbers of each design and regularly retiring designs, created a huge secondary market for the toys and increased their popularity and value as a collectible.
Ty systematically retired various designs, and many people assumed that all "retired" designs would rise in value the way that early retirees had. 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". Some time after the original announcement that the company would stop production, Ty asked the public to vote on whether the product should continue; fans and collectors voted "overwhelmingly" to keep the toys on the market.
At its height of popularity people would flip Beanies at as much as 1,000% on Ebay Indeed, at the height, Beanies made up 10% of Ebay's sales.
Warner was keenly aware that the Beanie Babies bubble could burst and eventually started forcing retailers receiving the latest Beanies to also stock other products lines by his company. None of these lines did as well as Beanie Babies although they kept the company alive after the fad ended and eventually some became successful in their own right.