It’s easy to look at the current financial landscape and recognize hints of Beanie Baby-like bubbles in, for example, NFTs. Then again, it’s also unfathomable to imagine how we value most things, from personal mementos to art to blunt-smoking digital apes. When I ask Boeker what makes a Beanie Baby worth anything, then or today, her answer is frank: “It’s what people are willing to pay for it.” Why some people are willing to pay anything for it is harder to square.įor most, it’s unfathomable to imagine spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a stuffed animal. It’s that the most coveted Beanie Babies today are the ones most people have never heard of. It’s not that Beanie Babies are worthless - collectors in the hobby are willing to pay quite a bit of money for the right ones. “I hate getting people’s hopes up, because we’re constantly crushing dreams,” Boeker says. Now, when cleaning out their basements or going through bins left behind by their grandparents, some people decide to check in - just in case - to see if they’re sitting on a gold mine of ’90s relics. Some people stole litters of them, and at least one person was reportedly killed in a Beanie-related dispute. When I ask what makes a Beanie Baby worth anything, her answer is frank: “It’s what people are willing to pay for it”Īt the height of Beanie Baby mania in the 1990s, plenty of people genuinely believed the toys might be the key to their retirement or their kids’ college tuition. “If it’s a dirty Beanie,” they’ll say so. Their customers prefer that they don’t give negative marks to the Beanies, but they have to be honest. “You get all those adjectives in there,” Boeker says. They charge $5 per Beanie Baby for a sticker that says whether the toy is counterfeit for $15, they’ll put it in a tamper-resistant display case and tell you whether it’s “museum quality,” “mint condition,” and even “magnificent.” Estenssoro used to do the authenticating alone, and Boeker joined in April 2021. Their names, naturally, are Karen, Karen, and Becky.īoeker and Becky - Estenssoro - also run a Beanie Baby authentication service, True Blue Beans. Combined, they have several decades of Beanie experience. She’s also one of three women behind a Beanie Baby pricing guide and a Facebook group for collectors with tens of thousands of members. She sold Beanie Babies to pay for an emergency appendectomy about 20 years ago and, more recently, to help pay for her son’s wedding. The frenzy around them faded long ago, as these types of things tend to do. Honestly, if you think about it too long, the entire concept of worth can fall apart.īoeker, 54, can’t quite pinpoint why she’s dedicated more than 25 years of her life to Beanie Babies. Of course, the value of the real ones is debatable, too. “It’s just so sad to see somebody spend so much money on something that isn’t real.” That’s what Karen Boeker, counterfeit Beanie Baby expert, says motivates her work: separating the valuable Beanie Babies from the pretenders.
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