‘The Beanie Bubble’ Burst: Inside Billionaire Ty Warner’s Furry Empire

By Savannah Walsh

One week after the pop cultural dominance of Barbenheimer, we’re getting a new film about both a beloved toy and a man whose invention leads to unforeseen fallout. At the center of that Venn diagram is The Beanie Bubble, which follows the boom-and-bust of the ’90s Beanie Baby craze, and is now streaming on AppleTV+. “There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest, we did,” reads a cheeky disclaimer at the start of the film, which is based on Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 book, The Great Beanie Baby Battle: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute.

Founder Ty Warner’s first name graces each heart-shaped Beanie Baby tag. But the toy’s story is told through the perspective of three women who figured prominently in its rise. Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), Sheila (Sarah Snook), and Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan) are fictional characters, broadly based on three women in the life of Ty Warner, played in the film by Zach Galifianakis.

In the film, Warner’s first business is selling stuffed Himalayan cats with Robbie, who is inspired by his real-life ex-girlfriend and business partner Patricia Roche—also known as the namesake for Beanie Baby “Patti the Platypus.”

Sheila, meanwhile, was inspired by lighting designer Faith McGowan, another of Warner’s former girlfriends. In the film, she gives their relationship a shot only after he bonds with her two children. As McGowan’s daughter Lauren Boldebuck told Chicago Magazine in 2014, her mother really “didn’t really like [Warner] at first.”

Screenwriter Kristin Gore (daughter of Al) not only adapted the screenplay, but codirected the film with her husband, OK Go lead singer Damian Kulash Jr. She shows Warner conceiving of Beanie Babies when Sheila’s daughters request “softer” stuffed animals that are small enough to fit in their backpacks. “Legs the Frog,” Ty Inc.’s first official Beanie Baby, was born in 1993. But the animals, which were intentionally under-stuffed to increase posability, gathered dust on shelves and at trade shows. “Their big launch was a total flop—couldn’t sell Beanies for two years,” says Maya, a college freshman initially hired to “brush and tweeze the display cats” and answer phones at Ty Inc. In the film, interest piques only when she suggests to a buyer that a certain animal is a limited edition. Maya is a proxy for Lina Trivedi, described in Bissonnette’s book as “the $12-per-hour sociology major who made Ty Warner a billionaire.” Only the 12th employee ever at the company, Trivedi, like Maya, is credited with launching the product line’s website, writing custom poems for each Beanie (she once penned 86 in only three days), and introducing Warner to the lucrative world of eBay.

The business model of Beanie was built on the illusion of scarcity. Warner would limit the number of Beanie Babies any seller was allowed to purchase and “retire” certain models at his whim. Soon, word spread about the stuffed animal, from Ty Inc.’s Chicago headquarters throughout the Midwest. Because of the perception that demand exceeded supply, Beanies—which were sold for $5 in stores—would fetch on average six times that on eBay, where collectors hoarding the product could command a pretty penny.

Within five years of its creation, the Beanie Baby brand had surpassed $1.4 billion in its annual sales and comprised 10% of all purchases on eBay. Profits soared, in part, because Warner only sold to smaller gift shops—retailers with less competing toy product and the ability to prominently display the Beanies. “By keeping them in the mom-and-pops, you kept them really loyal to Ty,” Bill Harlow of Ty Canada told Bissonnette in his book. In the film, we see Warner refusing to meet with Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us. He also turns down a Barbie tie-in with Mattel and a call from Steven Spielberg’s office because he’s “not a sellout.” McDonald’s, however, proved to be an exception to Warner’s rule, in both real life and the film.

Maya tells Warner that such a partnership could backfire: “It would be like a Super Bowl ad for a bake sale,” she says. Undeterred, in 1997, McDonald’s produces 100 million Teenie Beanie Babies as part of an exclusive Happy Meals promotion. Consumers flock to the golden arches in droves. That part is factual: “Some customers ordered a hundred Happy Meals and asked the cashier to keep the food,” wrote Bissonnette. One Ohio location had employees answer the phones with a status update, “Good morning, McDonald’s. We have the moose and the lamb.” One McDonald’s employee was arrested for stealing $6,000 worth of Teenie Beanies.

That wasn’t the only dark scenario to emerge in the rush for plush. Beanie mania led to theft, a trade dispute during the Clinton administration, and even death in a 1999 altercation outside of a Hallmark store. An estranged couple in Las Vegas squatted on the ground of a courtroom to divy up their Beanie collection as part of a contentious divorce proceeding. And lives were put in danger when onlookers in Atlanta stopped their vehicles to salvage stock that spilled from a truck carrying Beanie Babies. As Bissonette writes, the Beanie train “had driven a large swath of America into a state of greed-fueled delusion”

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“Everything got just a little bit out of control, Ty included,” Maya agrees in the film. Warner, once referred to as “the Steve Jobs of plush,” and worth a bewildering $6 billion (according to Forbes estimate in 2002), had a penchant for plastic surgery. He gets multiple facelifts over the course of the film (though Galifinakis’s face doesn’t really reflect them) and even encourages Sheila and her daughters to get nose jobs. “As the saying goes, ‘genius is 1% inspiration, 99% presentation,’” Warner declares. In life, Bissonnette writes, Warner embarked on “a 20-year odyssey of plastic surgery” and even “used black-sheep embryo injections to maintain his youth.”

Eventually, Warner began to lose his grasp on the collector craze. In The Beanie Bubble, Maya warns her boss that if company output catches up to consumer demand, their business model will go kaput. Tensions come to a head at a company Christmas party amongst Warner and the three women whose value he underestimates. Robbie winds up helming Ty Inc.’s UK operations, just as Roche did for a time. Maya is passed over as COO, then leaves the corporation to join the next big toy craze—Pokémon. Trivedi similarly continues working as an entrepreneur in the ecommerce space.

Sheila, meanwhile, sells cancelled “Spooky” Beanie Babies that name her daughter as the toy’s creator on the tag (Ty replaces her name with his), and leaves Warner to start a new life with her children. Previously, she had been entirely dependent on him. So was McGowan, the woman Sheila is based on.“If Ty changed the locks on the Oak Brook house while the girls were at school or I was at work, I had nothing,” McGowan reportedly wrote in her unpublished memoir. “No house. No money in the bank. No employee severance. Not even a credit card.”

A few weeks after the real-life 1993 company Christmas party, Warner told her that his pretax income for the year was $700 million—more than Mattel’s and Hasbro’s earnings combined. At that point, the real McGowan made an exit plan. She hawked a “#1 Bear” that Warner had gifted her and his employees for $10,000 and skipped town. When McGowan died in 2013, Warner attended the funeral, her daughter Lauren told Chicago Magazine.

Warner announced in 1999 that he was planning to retire the Beanie Baby brand on December 31 of that year. His notice incited a frenzy as retailers and collectors scrambled to buy up the remaining stock before the new millennium. Fans flooded Leonard Tannenbaum’s Beanie Nation website with eulogies, as reported by CBS News. “To them this is really affecting their lives more than most things that you guys have on the news, this to them is everything,” he told the outlet.

But Beanie’s obituary turned out to be merely another of Warner’s marketing ploys. Three months after he made his initial announcement, he changed course. “After much thought, I am willing to put the fate of Beanie Babies in your hands,’’ Warner wrote, asking people to vote on the Beanies’ survival. To the surprise of no one, the brand lived on, although sales would plummet in the years that followed (by more than 90%, according to Bissonette). Even once-coveted collectables, like the royal purple Princess Diana commemorative Beanie Baby following her tragic 1997 death, now languish on eBay.

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With the tides of the toy industry turning, Warner became a real estate tycoon, scooping up the Four Seasons Hotel New York for $275 million in 1999, followed by resorts in Hawaii, Mexico, and the famed San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, California. Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin would be married there, as would as Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger; John F. Kennedy and Jackie Onassis had honeymooned there as well, according to The New York Post. But once again, fate was not on Warner’s side. Warner lost so much money on his real estate ventures that he went 12 years without paying any individual federal income taxes, ProPublica reported in 2021.

The real Warner’s tax woes don’t stop there. In 2013, he was arrested for tax evasion after keeping more than $100 million in secret Swiss bank accounts. Appearing in a Chicago court, Warner said, “I never realized the biggest mistake of my life would cost me the respect of those closest to me.” In documents requesting leniency, Warner’s attorneys blamed his conduct on his upbringing in an “unhappy family,” citing his mother Georgia’s diagnosis as a paranoid schizophrenic. Warner’s childhood is referenced only briefly in The Beanie Bubble, though. At one point, Galifianakis’s character tells Robbie that his father, who was also in the toy biz, was “abusive. . .The only time my dad was proud of me is when our girlfriend told him how good I was in bed,” he says. In the film, Warner never elaborates on what he meant by that, exactly.

A decade ago, Warner paid a $53.5 million civil penalty connected to his tax evasion plea —a drop in the bucket of his estimated net worth—and was sentenced to two years’ probation and 500 hours of community service. Beanie Babies live on—as a punchline, as a product, and as a pipe dream for those stockpiling stuffed animals in hopes of a payout that, for most, was never delivered.

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