H. Ty Warner’s Beanie Baby business remains very much alive and well, if more modest in scale, says Michael W. Kanzler, chief operating officer at Ty Inc., Warner’s plush-toy company.
“I see it as a good, solid, steady product,” he said, likening it to the once-hot yo-yo, which remains a popular toy for school kids.
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What does this mean, in numbers? The ultraprivate Ty Inc. isn’t saying.
But sales clearly are down from their peak in 1998, the one year Ty published figures as a way to thumb its nose at Hasbro and Mattel. That year, net operating income was $700 million on sales of more than $1 billion.
Some published reports put annual sales in recent years at $750 million, but they do not identify the source of the estimate.
A look at the nation’s plush-toy industry offers some clues.
Sales of traditional plush toys (those that don’t do anything special, like walk or talk), were $1 billion in 2003, down 10 percent from 2002, said Christina Charasse, senior toy analyst at NPD Group Inc.
Ty is one of the major manufacturers of such toys, but still, its sales are just a part of that total.
And NPD estimates Ty product sales in 2003 were 28 percent less than in 2002, though it does not issue estimated sales in dollars.
“Baby Boomers had been caught up in a collecting phase, but people are not collecting like they used to,” said Pam Danziger, author of “Why People Buy Things They Don’t Need.”
“Now people want to get rid of things, of clutter, of all the junk collected over the last 20 years,” she said. “It’s a totally new mentality.”
Kanzler says he thinks the popularity of the toy may run in cycles.
“Will it catch on like it did before? I don’t know,” he said. “But those little troll dolls were hot when I was a kid, and then when I was 25, people were nutty for them again.”