Find the Beanie Boo That Shares Your Birthday

A of the quiet pleasure of collecting Ty is that nearly every character has a birthday. It's printed on the tag and listed on the website, and once you notice it you can't unnotice it. Spitfire the Pink Dragon is 25 February. Binky the Bush Baby is 7 January. Sheldon the Coral Octopus turns up on 30 December, right in the middle of the Christmas leftovers. It's a small detail, and it's the reason an enormous number of collections start.

The practical value shows up first in gift buying.

Choosing a soft toy for a child you don't know well is guesswork, and guesswork produces the toy that gets politely thanked for and then ignored. A birthday match sidesteps that entirely. You're not asking whether they prefer owls to octopuses, you're handing over the one character in the whole range that shares their date. Children remember that. So do adults, which is why we sell plenty of birthday matches to people buying for other grown-ups.

The other thing birthdays do is give a collection a shape.

Ty releases new characters constantly, and without some kind of rule a collection just becomes a pile.

Some collectors work through the calendar, one character per month, twelve on the shelf and done. Others collect the birthdays of everyone in the family, so the display quietly becomes a family tree made of plush. A few go further and add pets, anniversaries, the day they moved into the house. Any of these beats buying whatever happens to be new.

Now, here are two things worth knowing before you start. The birthday lives on the tag as well as online, so if the date is part of the point, keep the tag on. And not every Ty product has one. Most licensed characters don't — Bluey, Stitch, the Marvel range and similar are named rather than dated — so a calendar collection needs to draw from the Beanie Boos, Beanie Bellies and Beanie Balls, where birthdays are standard.

Start with the dates that already matter to you. In our experience the collection takes care of the rest.

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