'Allo! I'm not contributing to Ciao for the time being but if you are bored / desperate / weird enou...
'Allo! I'm not contributing to Ciao for the time being but if you are bored / desperate / weird enough to wish to continue to read my ramblings, you can find me on Dooyoo under the user name plipplop. See you around! :P
Member since:15.07.2000
Reviews:694
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Beanie Babies are those cute little soft toys that have beans in their feet, hands and bums. You've probably seen the ones with a red and white TY logo in most shops - there are hundreds of different ones - and they retail at around £5.
The appeal with BeanieBabies is their size - you can get a beanie version of just about any animal in the world - and Ty use all sorts of colours and fabrics to create certain techniqiues. The most collectable ones are generally the bears - these have created a real demand amongst retailers, and you may be surprised to know that some of them can fetch £5,000 at an auction.
But before you rush headlong into this cuddly world of soft little people, you should be aware that all is not what it seems. Far from being a child's plaything, the Beanie Baby isone of the most capitalised commodities available in the world today, and you will be shocked to see the depths to which certain "collectors" will plumb to get that hard-to-find bear.
It starts right at the top. Only authorised retailers may stock Beanie Babies. They are not able to specifically order what they want - they will receive what they're given and be grateful. Needless to say, this creates a suprlus of all the ugly ones that nobody wants, so, surprise, surprise, they pass the cost on to the consumer. The current recommended retail price of a Beanie Baby is £3.95, but the retailers have come up with ingenious ways of screwing every last penny from your pocket. Some of them will completely ignore the RRP and simply charge based on what they think they can get - an online retailer's stock ranges from £3.95 to £150.00 per Beanie. Another cunning way round the RRP is to insist that your customers buy a certain quantity before they can have one of the bears. A small shop in Birmingham insists that you buy 10 non - bear Beanies before you can have a bear = £43.89. They're not silly are they?
Ty - the manufacturers - have created a market that they can completely manipulate as and when they see fit. There is no documentation that tells you how many of each beanie have been made, but TY came up with the clever idea of retiring each Beanie so that it wasn't around forever - thus artifically increasing demand. The TY coup de grace came in 1999 when every single Beanie was retired and then - lo and behold - re-introduced in 2000 due to public demand. I wonder if December 1999 sales were particulalrly healthy?
Occasionally, TY "give away" a beanie to their best dealers or employees as a thank you. The most recent of these - Billionaire 3 - currently fetches about 3 grand at auction because only 150 were released - it all adds to the brand mystique.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that these carrot and stick measures create a breed of sly, pernicious, unpleasant collectors that really have to be seen to be believed.
The condition of these toys is absolutely paramount - something that any collector would expect - but you'd be amazed how shabbily some dealers treat the goods. I ordered two of the larger Beanie Buddies - cuter than the Babies - and they turned up squashed into an old Soy Sauce box. When I questioned the dealer she pointed out that "they were only stuffed toys after all" - oh, that'll be why you charged six times the retail price then?
I really like teddy bears - and the Ty ones are particularly cute - but I'm afraid any sense of fun and collectability was driven out ages ago. If you're going to collect these you had better be prepared to compete in a bloodthirsty market place.
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My sisters mate collects the babies and got into a proper fight at a collectors fair over a lion *I think* which another woman also wanted... bizarre! lol Chris x
Lizard_Lover 28.01.2004 12:31
Guffaw at the soy sauce box. We prefer the Buddies too and I only really buy the Babies when they're cheap.
Dec 28th, 2000
(Jan 20th, 2001)
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