The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette

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The Fiscal Times spoke with Bissonnette about the colorful rise and dramatic fall of Beanie Babies and the lessons that people can learn from them. Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to tax evasion. Warner’s hubris eventually got the best of him, too. Prices for Beanies eventually crashed and collections, which some people insured for thousands of dollars, became worthless. In 1999, Jeffrey White, a career criminal from West Virginia, shot and killed a coworker at a lumberyard after an argument over Beanie Babies. When he would suddenly change product designs, collectors and wannabe entrepreneurs would snap up the $5 plushes and resell them on eBay at mark-ups topping 1,000 percent. He ignored the naysayers after Beanie Babies flopped during their initial debut, and pressed forward with a product he believed in more than anyone else. Like Jobs, Warner wasn’t afraid to take risks. SLIDESHOW: 15 of the Most Valuable Beanie Babies In an interview, Bissonnette likened Warner’s obsession with creating the “perfect” Beanie to the maniacal focus late Apple CEO Steve Jobs put on designing products such as the iPhone that became a ubiquitous part of the modern world. It also is chock full of irony, such as the fact that an extremely unlikeable man such as Warner could be responsible for creating something so lovable.

The Beanie Babies story at times reads like a Shakespearean tragedy as much as business school case study.

Along the way, Bissonnette shows how Beanies helped foster the rise of ecommerce and all sorts of other unintended consequences, including - believe it or not - murder. In a new book called The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, author Zac Bissonnette details how that passionate devotion rose up suddenly across the U.S. suddenly fell in love with the adorable 5-inch Beanie Baby dolls created by Ty Warner.

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette