In the winter of 1997, Katie Ford received a very special Christmas gift: a purple Beanie Baby teddy with a small white rose on its chest and a ribbon around its neck. Its name was Princess, in tribute to Diana, who had died just a few months before. “I was probably eight at the time, and my nan got hold of one for me,” explains Katie, now a 34-year-old vet based in Manchester. “I think she was more competitive about finding one than I was.” Her grandma, she explains, “was a frequent customer at the local Beanie shop”; she had accumulated so many “tokens” through purchasing Beanies for her grandchildren that she qualified to “go into a ballot to have a chance to get a Diana bear”.
As strange as it might seem more than 25 years later, a cuddly toy created to mourn the untimely passing of the People’s Princess was in serious demand (“I coveted her,” one 31-year-old friend admits when I canvass my millennial peers for Princess anecdotes). In the late Nineties, Beanie Babies were a bona fide phenomenon, and Diana’s tragic death coincided with the peak of the boom. The strange story behind Beanie-mania is now the focus of Apple TV+’s film The Beanie Bubble, which stars Zach Galifianakis as the brand’s idiosyncratic founder Ty Warner.
