A bestselling journalist delivers the never-before-told story of the plush animal craze that became the tulip mania of the 1990s
In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. In just three years, collectors who saw the toys as a means of speculation made creator Ty Warner, an eccentric college dropout, a billionaire—without advertising or big-box distribution. Beanie Babies were ten percent of eBay’s sales in its early days, with an average selling price of $30—six times the retail price. At the peak of the bubble in 1999, Warner reported a personal income of $662 million—more than Hasbro and Mattel combined.
The end of the craze was swift and devastating, with “rare” Beanie Babies deemed worthless as quickly as they’d once been deemed priceless.
Bissonnette draws on hundreds of interviews (including a visit to a man who lives with his 40,000 Ty products and an in-prison interview with a guy who killed a coworker over a Beanie Baby debt) for the first book on the strangest speculative mania of all time.
Renowned business author David Magee fuses both the interesting history and philosophy of one of America’s most well-known companies in this entertaining aid for business management. While other American businesses are crumbling under low-cost...
“It’s not the magic that makes it work; it’s the way we work that makes it magic.”The secret for creating “magic” in our careers, our organizations, and our lives is simple: outstanding leadership—the kind t...
The financial establishment—banks and investment bankers, such as Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley—were the cowboys, recklessly assuming risks, leveraging up to astronomical levels, a...
At the end of 2008, Ford Motor Company was just months away from running out of cash. With the auto industry careening toward ruin, Congress offered all three Detroit automakers a bailout. General Motors and Chrysler grabbed the taxpayer lifeline, b...
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Atlantic • The Huffington Post • Men’s Journal • MSN (U.K.) • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION AW...
From Wall Street to Main Street, John Brooks, longtime contributor to the New Yorker, brings to life in vivid fashion twelve classic and timeless tales of corporate and financial life in America. What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster ...
The "extraordinary" (Financial Times) instant New York Times bestseller exposing how a "modern Gatsby" swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others--a "must read" (Booklist) tale of finance run amok and "the heist of the centur...
The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos. Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content...
A riveting and timely intellectual history of one of our most important capitalist institutions, Harvard Business School, from the bestselling author of The Firm.With The Firm, financial journalist Duff McDonald pulled back the curtain on consultin...
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