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Plan in Advance What to Collect
This guidance is for anyone who wants to be a serious Ty collector. If your ultimate goal is 15 or 20 beanies
around the house or office, don't waste your time reading this. Just go to eBay, Amazon or your local Ty retailer and buy a few
Beanies you like. If you believe you might make a profit "investing" in beanies, go directly to your toilet and flush
a hundred dollar bill. Focus intently as your money goes down the drain. Now flush another hundred dollar bill. This is
a learning experience. If you're stubborn, flush a third hundred dollar bill. You just replicated the Beanie investing
experience. Now go invest in something more conservative and thank us for saving you thousands of dollars.
For serious collectors, there are important decisions to make before starting a collection. Few people realize
just how many Ty products there are. Beanie collecting is fun but it can turn into a frustrating experience if you start
spending money without a plan.
 The first consideration should be the amount of available display space in your home or office. Be honest with yourself. If you don't have enough space to display
a collection, what's the point of collecting? Without sufficient space your collection will end up in cardboard boxes or plastic storage containers in the basement.
Five years from now you'll be selling them to reclaim the space for something else. If you believe your stored collection will increase in value over time, go back to the
top of this page and follow the instructions in the
second half of the first paragraph.
If your available display space is limited, stick to Beanie Babies, Basket Beanies, PinkyS, Jingle Beanies,
key-clips or other small
Ty collectibles. If you are not space-challenged it might be fun to collect Beanie Buddies, Classics or
any of Ty's other large plush items.
Reserve space for a thousand items or more if you plan to collect the larger
plush lines. Do the research first, because some of
the collectibles are a bit larger than you might suspect. The Buddies, Punkies
and Classics families include many items that are
40 or more inches tall.
Now that you have a reasonable estimate of your available space, decide WHAT to collect. Ty has produced literally thousands
of plush toys comprising several families. You've probably heard of Beanie Babies, Beanie Buddies, Ty Girlz and the Teenie Beanie Babies
(distributed by McDonalds). But those are only four of the product lines. There are now more than 25 families (and growing).
One family has only three beanies (Valenteenies), but most families have 50 or more. The
Beanie Baby family has more than 2,500
items if you count variations and oddities.
The goal of many collectors is to acquire ALL of the items in one or more of
Ty's product families. With a goal like that, it certainly makes sense to learn
how many individual items there are in each family. That takes a little
research. Ty collecting can turn quickly into a time consuming
and expensive hobby. When I say "expensive," I'm talking 6 figures.
Beanie is a slang word commonly applied to any Ty product or even any small stuffed animal regardless of
manufacturer. We need to be more specific, so we'll start with Beanie Babies. Lets collect Ty Beanie Babies. All of
them? OK. That limits our scope to approximately 2,000 items for a complete collection. Wait . . . it's more complicated than
that. The number could be much higher. Maybe we should start with just one Beanie Baby to illustrate the dilemma.
We'll start with Pinchers. Pinchers is a pretty famous lobster because he's one of the original nine Beanie Babies introduced
by Ty in 1993. There is only one Pinchers, right? Well . . . not really. There is a first generation (gen) Pinchers, a second
gen Pinchers, a third, fourth and fifth. The generation is determined by the style of the
Ty heart-shaped swing tag attached to
the Beanie Baby.
Beanie Baby swing tags
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If you have Pinchers without his Ty swing tag, you don't know which generation he is? If you don't care about generations,
any one Pinchers will do . . . maybe.
Beanie Babies don't just have a swing tag, they also have a tush tag; a small rectangular cloth tag normally sewn into
a seam on their rear end. The tush tags also come in different generations. There are five possible generations of tush tags
for Pinchers. You're probably getting a hint of where this is going, especially when you learn that Pinchers with a fifth
generation swing tag doesn't necessarily have a fifth generation tush tag. He may have a fourth generation tush tag.
Maybe it would be easier to collect Beanie Babies by name instead of generation. That way you need only one Pinchers because
all of the different generations of Pinchers look pretty much the same. That would save money too, because you can buy a 4th or 5th
gen Pinchers for one or two dollars, but a 1st gen Pinchers with both of his tags will cost anywhere from $300 to $1,000 or more,
depending on his condition and the condition of his tags.
Oh . . . I almost forgot. We probably need the BBOC Pinchers too. BBOC was the Beanie Babies Official Club. In 2005, club
members could purchase replicas of the original 9 Beanie Babies. Pinchers showed up again, this time with a BBOC button stuck
to his tail. Well, it is a Beanie Baby and we're collecting them all, right?
Now for a complication. Pinchers started out as Pinchers but
escaped from the factory for a short time with a 1st generation tush tag and a
swing tag with the name misspelled Punchers. Ty corrected the mistake
but an unknown (limited) number of Punchers found their way to the
retail market. This is known as a production mistake or "oddity" and it might have a bearing on your decision about WHAT to collect.
Over the years, Ty accidentally produced numerous oddities and some people specialize in collecting
them. That can be fun and challenging but it is difficult to place a legitimate
value on oddities because nobody really knows how many of them were produced.
Maybe we should avoid the oddities for now, purchase a 4th gen Pinchers for two dollars and move on to
Tank. Start saving
though for Punchers. Although many of the well-known tag oddities are
available for reasonable prices not much more than the correct version, Punchers will cost you a few months worth of groceries for a large family if you want him.
Tank showed up in 1996. The original Tank had seven lines sewn into his body to imitate an armadillo's armor plates. Later
in 1996, Ty released a new Tank with nine lines sewn in. To confuse the matter further, a second 9-line Tank showed up with
a design that made the shell more realistic in appearance. Collectors refer to them as the "9-line with shell" and the "9-line
no shell" versions. But it's really two different versions of a Beanie Baby
sharing the same name.
Tank also has multiple generations of swing and tush tags. Since we're keeping this simple and inexpensive, we'll buy one 7-line
Tank, one 9-line Tank no shell, and one 9-line Tank with shell . . . unless you want to collect both types of swing tags.
Tank
had a poem inside his swing tag (most Beanie Babies do). Some of the poems used the word "border" and some used the work
"boarder." You decide whether you need all the different swing tags.
Time to pause while you decide how much money you can afford to spend on this collection. It might be less expensive and just as
much fun to collect a different Ty product, or maybe specialize in just one type of Beanie Baby. Many collectors specialize. Some
collect only the bears. Some select an animal category and collect only those. If you like frogs, there are several Beanie Baby frogs,
but if there aren't enough to make you feel like you have a credible collection, you can also add Beanie Buddy Frogs, Beanie Classic
Frogs, the Beanie Boo frog and more. All of those are made by Ty.
It might be fun to specialize in one category of Ty animals, like cats.
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Some collectors do that with monkeys, giraffes, fish, etc. Some collectors acquire only
Ty key-clips. Some specialize
in the licensed Ty products like Dora,
SpongeBob, Backyardigans, Boblins,
Hello Kitty, or characters from popular movies.
Some collect only Peace bears and some specialize in all the beanies of one color. Other collectors specialize in Beanie Babies
that were only released in foreign countries. The possibilities are endless. The overall point here is to figure out specifically
what to collect before you start the collection.
There are numerous sites on the Internet with information about Ty products, but our favorite reference so far is the paperback
book, Ty Beanie Tracker, Third Edition, edited by Karen Holmes. Since the book was published, Karen has also sold periodic
updates. For information on Ty products produced after the book was published,
check here or do a Google search. Armed with those
two resources and Google, you should be able to decide whether you want to jump in at the shallow end or the deep end of the
Ty pool.
When you get to the deep end, look us up and we'll compare notes.
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Last update - April 6, 2012
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