Beanie Babies had become a craze in the Chicago suburbs, and local and then national collectibles dealers and magazines started to cover it. In early 1996, Peggy Gallagher wrote the first magazine piece on the animals for a collectibles magazine called Rosie's Collectors' Bulletin. She emphasized the rare pieces, especially Peanut, and their rising values — and included her address where collectors could send a SASE to receive her price guide. But Peggy's price guide actually came before there was a well-organized market for Beanie Babies. In many cases, she just made values up. She watched in elation as the market moved up to reflect the prices she'd concocted.

By 1997, a New Jersey father's self-published price guide pegged Peanut's value at $2,500. The book predicted that it would be worth $7,500 by 2008. That price guide, The Beanie Baby Handbook, sold more than three million copies to become one of the best-selling self-published books of all time. An ad in Mary Beth's Beanie World extolled the importance of purchasing hard-shell plastic lockets to protect the animals' heart-shaped paper tags that read "Safety Precaution: Please remove all swing tags." It led with this headline: "How Do You Protect An Investment That Increases By 8,400%[?]" On the left, with her trunk flowing off the page, was Peanut.

The tulip mania of 1630s Holland had its Semper Augustus bulb, and the tech stock bubble had the stories of vast riches in early IPOs. For Beanie Babies, it all began with Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant. A stuffed animal had appreciated in value by a factor of a thousand, and that was a story that could spread. The Chicago Tribune explained it: "Start talking Beanies, and just about everybody knows somebody who financed a wedding, a vacation, a new van or what have you with the proceeds of Beanie sales."

The Beanie market's self-styled experts stoked the idea that in the new Beanies Ty was releasing every few months, there existed specimens that would experience the same appreciation patterns of Peanut. The Beanie prognosticators operated in the same way that analyst Henry Blodget, who correctly predicted in October of 1998 that Amazon stock would soar by two-thirds in less than a year, used the credibility of his early success to promote newer companies with more dubious prospects.

After Beanie Babies caught on, the Chinese factories started pumping them out in huge quantities — although Ty's decision to sell his animals only through small, independently owned stores masked just how many were being made because no store had more than a couple dozen of each style.

"People didn't understand that the ones people were making $800 on were really rare," says Paula Abrinko, the doctor who'd been among the first aggressive collectors. "By the time they had heard that people were making money, the really hot ones were all gone." By mid-1998, all of the earliest Chicago collectors were sitting on six-figure fortunes. Abrinko quietly sold a few of her rarest Beanies and used the proceeds to adopt her first child. Her sister, Peggy, celebrated her Beanie winnings with a new Mercedes and a vanity license plate: "BBABIES."