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  • 2015-04-20 (xsd:date)
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  • Couple Buys Limited Edition Beanie Baby Worth Thousands for £10 (en)
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  • Ty, the company that produced teddy bear-like animals known as Beanie Babies, stuffed with beans and plastic pellets and labeled with a heart-shaped TY, reportedly made more than $6 billion from their products in the 1990s. Some collectors made far less, however, investing money in Beanie Baby speculation that didn’t pay off when the craze panned out around 1999. But in April 2015 the UK press sensationally reported that one couple had unexpectedly found Beanie Baby gold. According to various UK press accounts, Leah Rogers and Ryan Flanagan were selling toys at a car boot sale (akin to a flea market) in Bude, Cornwall, when they noticed a purple bear at the stall of a nearby fellow vendor seller. Ryan Flanagan, 22, who used to collect the Beanie Baby bears, recognized it as a Princess Beanie Baby — supposedly one of only 100 such limited edition bears produced in 1997 to raise money for the Princess of Wales Memorial Trust after Princess Diana was killed in a tragic car accident — and picked it up for a mere £10 (about US $15). Leah and Ryan quickly offered their bear for sale on eBay with a starting bid of £20,000 (about US $30,000), hoping to turn their find around to finance a down payment for a house. However, the value of their find was widely reported as £62,500 (about US $93,000) not because that is the true worth of the Princess bear based on its relative availability and price history, but simply because another example of the same bear was currently offered for sale on the online auction site eBay at that price. However, the prices that sellers post for online sales in the collectibles market are often unrealistically inflated due to misinformation or deliberate attempts to drive up prices and mislead potential buyers. Other Ty collectors have disputed the claim that any version of the Princess Beanie Baby was limited to a 100-piece edition and maintain that it is far more common (and therefore far less valuable) than widely reported. For example, the Beanie Baby Buzz web site states that: The Ty Collector web site similarly reported that the value of the Princess bear had been vastly overstated in media reports: Ty Collector pegs the value of the Princess Beanie Baby bear at between $5 and $40, depending on version and condition. (en)
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