A .jpg sold for millions of dollars, is NFT the new Beanie Babies?
Every time we discuss NFTs, American netizens and the media always like to bring this analogy that is a little unfamiliar to us.
Beanie Babies, also known as "Beanie Babies", is a plush toy that swept the United States in the 90s. For young Americans, it may just be a dusty mess in the basement. But in the eyes of my parents' generation, this was once a promising investment, an opportunity to make a fortune, and a national frenzy that should not be missed.
Some people squatted in front of the computer until 12 a.m.; some people walked all over the Country in line to buy; some people experienced the excitement of buying for $50,000 and selling for $50,000; and others were ambitious to hoard goods in large quantities, and finally lost all their money, only to find that it was all bubbles.
Today, the Beanie Frenzy has faded and transformed into a pop culture symbol. Young people on YouTube rummaged through boxes and cabinets at home, hoping to find a beanie that "made me rich overnight". HBO Max recently released a documentary called "Beanie Mania," and Apple announced that it would make a new film on the subject. Some people even made these plush toys into NFT projects, calling them "a combination of my childhood dreams and modern passions."
Image from Vox
Is NFT the new Beanie Baby? Does turning them into NFTs have a chance to cause another frenzy?
Beanie Baby, the "Tulip Bubble" of the 90s
In 1986, Ty Warner founded the toy company Ty Inc. Seven years later, he launched the first beanie series, the main image is a cute little animal, deliberately selected bright and lively colors, priced at only 5 US dollars, but tepid and no one buys it.
From a product point of view, these plush toys are innovative. Before that, most of the competitors were filled with cotton full and stiff, and Doudouwa reduced the amount of cotton used, adding plastic particles to fill, allowing children to flexibly swing postures and increase playability. Later, Warner also gave each doll a human name, birthday and a short poem.
But what really makes it fanatical is the artificial scarcity.
Warner often discontinues a series or style of Doudou under the name of "modifying the design". In 1995, he discontinued a Peanut the Elephant and changed its color from royal blue to light blue. Because the early series was not produced much, the original price was later speculated to $5,000.
Peanut the Elephant
Various media reports and anecdotal rumors have suggested that he is a first-class "hunger marketing" master. The book "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute" claims that Warner's move was originally motivated by perfectionism and an obsession with details.
Warner has other "riot operations", such as his insistence on selling beanie dolls only in independent toy stores and refusing to enter the large chain Walmart or Toys R Us. The number of arrivals at each partner store is limited, and if you want to buy a specific style, you may have to run around and queue up to grab a break.
The first adult fans to set off a frenzy were "soccer moms." Most of them live in the suburbs and are good wives and mothers in middle-class families, busy with housework and childcare on a daily basis. In order to complete the set, they will deliberately call the cooperative stores in the United States to ask for inventory, and then fly to buy it back.
These mothers are like "fans" and "standing sisters" who chase stars, not only have their own, they also form an important part of the spread of Doudouwa. Some people publish their own magazines and sell more than 3 million copies; some people start blogs to pay close attention to the dynamics of Doudouwa and reply to emails to answer questions; and others sort out price guides and provide true and false identification services. This love even partially continues to this day.
Every time Doudouwa stops production, it will be announced on the official website. People are not sure whether the next thing to become scarce is sheep, camels or ducks, but the news of selling 5 times, 20 times, 1000 times the price is overwhelming, the investment value of plush toys is bragged about a little bit, and more and more people take the initiative to join in, wanting to make a fortune in a beautiful way.
At that time, the Doudouwa website announced the discontinued series
In 1997, Doudouwa cooperated with McDonald's to launch a mini version, 100 million plush toys, which were snatched up in just one week. Some people even bought 100 happy meals, no food, only toys – like today's crazy mcDonald's cat nest and KFC blind box.
Beanie baby working with McDonald's
That same year, the purple bear The Princess Beanie was born, with a white rose on its chest and a label that commemorated Princess Diana's poem. At the beginning, due to insufficient production and rush to release, the cooperative store was told that it could only order 12 pieces, which was misread as "super limited edition", and it was another round of madness.
Paul Burrell, the former housekeeper of Princess Diana, with Doudouwa, from GettyImages
The collective fanaticism for Doudouwa peaked around 1998.
This year, Ty Inc. sales exceeded $1.4 billion. Survey data shows that 64 percent of Americans own at least one. Doudouwa is also believed to have witnessed the rise of the Internet boom, and its buying and selling transactions accounted for 10% of eBay's total annual sales, which promoted the popularity and development of e-commerce to a certain extent. The following year, Warner squeezed into the top 400 of the Forbes Rich List, with an estimated net worth of $5 billion.
Ty Warner, the creator of Doudouwa, called him "the Steve Jobs of the stuffed toy world" by employees.
On the other side, the world becomes rather magical. There are couples who divorce and demand the division of property, squatting in court to divide the beanie babies; fake and shoddy copycat versions of the beanie babies have appeared, and some people claim to be repairmen fraud, and even murders caused by these plush toys...
Divorce is a real thing, pictured from Reuters
But as production continues to expand, "hunger marketing" is gradually out of play. At the end of 1999, Warner tried to make a big deal again, announcing that it would discontinue the entire Beanie series on the last day of the 20th century. After the news was released, people were surprised to find that the secondary market did not respond at all. The bubble burst like that.
Sales fell, prices plunged, and speculative adults scattered. TV actress Chris Robinson is one of the "bitter lords" who have lost all his money, and he spent about $100,000 on Doudouwa. He originally wanted to earn back the college tuition of his five children, but he lost everything; now, he can only sit dry with the family's 20,000 plush toys.
Robinson later made a short film about his bankruptcy
Humorist Dave Barry said that beanie babies were originally fun toys for children, but they were turned into "an obsessive, ridiculous, over-commercialized so-called hobby" by adults. Market historian Jeremy Grantham points out that the moment the price of beanie bubbles spirals and disconnects from value, it becomes a bubble.
This is a flaw in the human character. No matter how smart you are, no one can escape the bubble.
Is NFT the new Beanie Baby?
While reading "Beanie Bubbles: Popular Delusions and the Dark Side of Cuteness," best-selling author @_ElizabethMay tweeted this:
I'm reading a book about Beanie. If you replace every mention of "Bear No. 1" with "Boring Ape NFT," this is a book about NFTs.
Tweets were liked 12,000 times and retweeted 2,007 times. Passing netizens carried out nostalgic and loose discussions in the comment area.
Some people call NFT the same scam as Doudouwa. Others believe that NFT is even worse than Doudouwa - Doudouwa is cute and comfortable, even if it is not valuable to turn it out today, it can also be washed and given to children as toys, and NFTs cannot be caught and cannot be touched. Others can't wait to hear divorce stories about NFTs.
HBO Max's Beanie Baby documentary "Beanie Mania", some netizens said that this is also very similar to telling the story of NFT
Developer Rik Nieu tried to analyze the similarities between NFTs and Doudou from several perspectives.
He believes that from the perspective of the entire market, both have constantly emerging new designs. Specific to a series/style/project, scarce is created in a limited number (e.g. boring ape NFTs have only 10,000). Hype marketing is carried out through the Internet or media coverage, with distribution channels at your fingertips and attracting peer communities (Discord, Twitter, DAO, etc.).
Vox editor Emily Stewart adds that there is an unbridled optimism, a fanatical urge to own an item and believe that they will appreciate in value, and that both fields suffer from scams and crime.
Netizen: As long as there is a big V tweet, people who buy NFTs now will feel that Doudouwa was a great investment.
Arthur Suszko, 34, is a beanie lover and NFT collector. In his opinion, today's NFTs do have a lot of similarities with the Beanie Fever of the 90s. He launched an NFT project to keep the actual beanie baby himself, but opened the corresponding NFT for trading.
On the one hand, Suszko calls it "a combination of my childhood dreams and modern passions." On the other hand, he also knows that the NFT frenzy can be fleeting, and "no one cares about these randomly generated .jpeg that can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars right now."
Photo credit: Beanie Baby DAO
Most of today's discussion has focused on the hype and frenzy of NFT projects. But in fact, NFTs themselves are not comparable to Beanie.
NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a non-homogeneous token that uses blockchain technology to tokenize the ownership of a digital asset for you, which is unique and irreplaceable – to use an inappropriate analogy, NFT is more like the technology behind the beanie than the plush toy itself.
In contrast, boring apes, Crypo Punks and even the recent Phanta Bear (Phantom Bear) launched by Jay Chou's fashion brand are more comparable to Doudouwa.
Phanta Bear, courtesy of The Finery Report
NFT projects may come and go, prices may skyrocket or plummet, some form bubbles, some can't make a splash, but the underlying technology has always existed: NFT technology clearly knows which local tycoon a pixel wind .jpeg belongs to, and will also remember its transaction records along the way, specifically after several changes of hands, how to change hands from $6 to $6 million... Everything is there to follow.
The potential of NFTs doesn't stop there.
It can be a way for art to live forever (like Wong Kar-wai's "The Wonder Years"), it can be an incentive for creators (a share is received for each resale), it can be a form of identification, an admission ticket to a community, or an unlocking of some kind of participation and voting rights.
As for buying NFT artwork at sky-high prices, is it silly? See you.
Collecting in consumer culture is generally divided into 3 stages: acquisition, ownership, and resale. It is said that "it is difficult to buy a good heart", if you really like it, then from the perspective of art appreciation, its value to you is subjective and determined by you. If you want to follow suit, it's not a loss, because today some NFT projects have become social status symbols like tulips in the 1630s.
But if you're just investing speculatively and seeing others making a lot of money, then pay attention: once you can't find a receiver and the frenzy ends, you're likely to become the Robinson who stares at home with 20,000 plush toys.
Pictured from the HUSTLE
Economist Robert Shiller once wrote in Irrational Exuberance: "The expansion of speculative markets is often related to the perception of the masses that the future is brighter and more certain than in the past."
Putting aside the hype component, the people who were enthusiastic about buying Beanie Babies at that time may have good hopes for the millennium and the Internet. And today everyone follows the trend of NFT, blockchain, encryption, web3, decentralization, metaverse... Probably because of the expectations for the future described by these terms.
By the way, on the trading platform OpenSea, there is another NFT project that reproduces the 90s Doudouwa fever, and the introduction is ironic and interesting. It says, relive the 90s mania with Bubble Beanies!
Even if this bubble bursts like the previous one, it won't take up your attic space anymore.
Click "Watching"
It is the greatest motivation for us