In the early 1960s, Ty Warner dropped out of Kalamazoo College in Michigan and moved to California to become an actor. Soon he was a grocery store clerk, a gas station attendant, and a door-to-door salesman before joining a toy company full time.
In 1980, on a trip to Italy, Warner found himself fascinated by an assortment of stuffed cat toys he had never seen in the U. S. Three years later, he designed his own line of plush Himalayan cats, launched his own company (Ty, Inc.), then sold and shipped them for $20 apiece from his condo.
Initially, the public mocked his toys as road kill for being lightly stuffed. Warner says people didn't get it at first: His whole idea was to make each cat look real because it was soft and moved.
Eventually, Warner's business grew well beyond the Ty, Inc. condo, and by the early 1990s his popular line of Annual Collectible Bears had established his company as a thriving plush toy manufacturer.
By then, Warner already was thinking about creating small, inexpensive ($5) plush animals containing pellets for children to carry around in their pockets and book bags. In 1993, his first nine Beanie Babies debuted to sluggish sales. That changed in a flash when Ty, Inc. announced it was retiring the original nine.
The subsequent collecting craze sold a reported $700 million of them in a year.
In 1997, Ty, Inc. joined McDonald's for a Happy Meal promotion with 100 million of its new Ty Teenie Beanie Babies. After collectors swamped its restaurants, McDonald's national and international promotions in 1998 sold more than 250 million teenie beanies for more than $1 billion.
Today, Ty. Inc. is the world's largest toy manufacturer, and according to Forbes, Ty Warner's net worth is $2.7 billion.
