For more than twenty years, I dusted a shelf of Boyds Bears and told myself they would pay for something nice someday.
I bought them one or two at a time in the late 1990s, at a little gift shop I loved. I kept every box in the basement. I was sure that was the smart thing to do.
This fall, I finally looked up what they sell for. It was a lot less than I paid.
If you have a shelf like mine, I want to save you some guessing. These are the facts I found about Boyds Bears, Cherished Teddies and Tom Clark gnomes, and what I decided to do with ours.
Why So Many of Us Have These on a Shelf
In the 1990s, these little figures were everywhere. Card shops, gift shops and craft stores had whole tables of them.
They made easy gifts. A teacher, a sister or a friend at church could get one for a birthday and know she’d smile.
Lots of us collected them on purpose, too. The companies had collector clubs, and each year some pieces were “retired,” which made us want to get them before they were gone.
But all three lines were made in very large numbers. Boyds alone had sales of about $211 million in 1999, according to its own yearly report. When that many pieces are made, there are lots of them to go around later.
Kovels, the long-running antiques price guide, has written that the women who collected figurines in those years are now downsizing. Younger buyers just aren’t looking for them in the same way. That means more pieces for sale and fewer people shopping for them.
None of this means your collection was a mistake. You enjoyed it, and that counts. It just helps to know the facts before you make a plan.