Ty

Ty (stylized as ty) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. It was founded by Ty Warner in 1986. It designs, develops and sells products, most notably Beanie Babies, exclusively to specialty markets worldwide.

Internet

First business-to-consumer Website
Lina Trivedi was a college student when she worked at Ty Inc. and she approached Warner to talk about a new development that existed on college campuses called the Internet.  She indicated that the Internet was primarily a research tool, however, college students were starting to make personal websites and she thought creating a website for Beanie Babies could present an unprecedented opportunity to engage the market uniquely.  She brought to Ty's office a 14.4k modem and demonstrated how the Internet works.  Mr. Warner was intrigued and gave Trivedi a free license to create a website using her judgment and skills.  By the time the first iteration of the Ty website was published in late 1995, only 1.4% of Americans were using the Internet. The population of people using the Internet grew exponentially in the following years, along with the popularity of Beanie Babies.

Ty was the first business to produce a direct-to-consumer website designed to engage their market. This is a major contributing factor to the early and rapidly growing popularity of Beanie Babies. In tandem with the launch of the Ty Website, all Beanie Baby hangtags had the Ty Website URL and a call to action printed underneath the poems and birthdays that commanded audiences to visit the company Web site with text that read: Visit our web page!!! As a result, consumers were visiting the Ty Web site by the thousands to gain information about Beanie Babies, which was completely unprecedented at the time. Ty was the first business to leverage their Web site to connect and engage with consumers of their products. This effort evolved into the world's first Internet sensation.

Fundraising
Ty has been involved in a large amount of fundraising, with the proceeds donated to various causes. Some of this has been raised from the sale of certain Beanie Babies. It has also been raised through other means, such as voting for a fee.

One such fundraising Beanie Baby was Ariel, made to raise funds for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Its sales raised a total of $3.4 million for the foundation. Others include Aware and Awareness, sold to raise funds for breast cancer research and awareness; and Barbaro, created in memory of Barbaro the Horse, to raise funds for the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, which tried to save the horse.

Ty has also raised money for the 2004 PGA Tour with a beanie called ChariTee; one, signed by Jack Nicklaus was auctioned for $455.

Ty was the shirt sponsor of Portsmouth FC from 2002 to 2005, in which the club was promoted to the Premier League.

A beanie baby named "Cito" was given out to school children in Montecito, California to welcome them back to school after the area was affected by the 2018 Southern California mudflows.

In popular culture
During the wake of Beanie Babies' success, Beanie Baby-centric publications were issued. One of the largest was Mary Beth's Bean Bag World, a monthly magazine dedicated to Beanie Babies and competing plush toys. It ran from 1997 to 2001.

In August 2021, Beanie Babies was the season 1, episode 4 feature on Vice Media's Dark Side of the 90's entitled "Beanie Babies Go Bust".

A documentary film about Beanie Babies, titled Beanie Mania, was released on December 23, 2021, on HBO Max.

The story of Ty has also been covered by two films, both named The Beanie Bubble, one a 2022 documentary directed by Ben Kitnick and a 2023 comedy-drama directed by Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash and written by Gore, based on the 2015 book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette about the Beanie Babies bubble. It stars Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook and Geraldine Viswanathan.

References

External links

AboutBeanies – Beanie Baby history and information
Official TY distributor in Ukraine

1986 establishments in the United States
Beanie Babies
Companies based in DuPage County, Illinois
Oak Brook, Illinois
Toy companies established in 1986
Toy companies of the United States