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Jun 30, 2023

What Happened To The Beanie Bubble's Real Maya

Maya, the woman who designed Ty Inc.'s website in The Beanie Bubble, was inspired by a real-life woman who's gone on to achieve great things. Warning: Contains SPOILERS for The Beanie Bubble. After

Maya, the woman who designed Ty Inc.'s website in The Beanie Bubble, was inspired by a real-life woman who's gone on to achieve great things.

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for The Beanie Bubble.

After the happy ending in The Beanie Bubble, many people wonder what happened to the real Maya. On July 28, 2023, Apple TV Plus release the movie The Beanie Bubble. The movie tells the story of three women, Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), Sheila (Sarah Snook), and Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), who played a pivotal part in the Beanie Baby craze. Although Ty Warner's net worth makes him one of the richest people on the planet, these three contributed to the ultimate success of the '90s fad with their innovative ideas and skills.

Throughout The Beanie Bubble, a college student named Maya creates the company's website and digital marketing plan. She also innovates physical elements of the Beanies like the colors and tags. In fact, she writes most of the poems, personalizing them to each individual Beanie. The Beanie Bubble's true story is different in many ways than what's depicted on screen; however, writers based Maya on a real woman discussed in the book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette.

The real-life woman who inspired Maya in The Beanie Bubble is entrepreneur and inventor Lina Trivedi. Trivedi was covered in the chapter "The $12-per-Hour Sociology Major Who Made Ty Warner a Billionaire" of Bissonnette's book. Though she started out answering phones, Trivedi quickly took on other tasks in the workplace. When Trivedi came up with the idea to give the Beanies birthdays and poems, he jumped on this idea, asking her to write 86 poems in three days. Though they don't show her process of writing the poems, The Beanie Bubble shows Maya reading out Stripes the Tiger's poem, the first one Trivedi ever wrote in real life.

While the new tags helped make Beanie Babies unique from competitors, Trivedi's billion-dollar idea came in late 1995. According to The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, after being introduced to the internet by a professor, Trivedi saw the Beanie Baby chat rooms and came up with the idea to make an official Beanie Babies website. She quickly designed a website with flashy visuals and unique features. Maya performs the same tasks in The Beanie Bubble, creating their entire website and marketing campaign.

In The Beanie Bubble ending, Maya leaves after she's refused the position she rightfully earned. Ty Warner isn't willing to give her credit, a better title, or the money she earned. This largely reflects Lina Trivedi's real experience. In HBO Max's documentary Beanie Mania, Trivedi revealed that she left Ty Inc. after they refused to increase her salary from $12 an hour to $120,000 a year, a small amount for the multi-billion dollar company. She later learned that board members of the company thought the internet was a passing fad.

Related: The Beanie Bubble Directors On Beanie Babies & The American Dream

Nowadays, Lina Trivedi is regarded as a pioneer of e-commerce for her work with Beanie Babies. According to The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, Trivedi opened the first business-to-consumer website where customers could get new information, buy products, and interact with one another. She created a feature where Beanie Babies delivered updates on the products every month, with customers picking the monthly Beanie through a poll. Customers had the opportunity to talk with each other online and trade or sell their items, a new concept at the time. Consumer-facing websites are commonplace on the internet today. Many websites use chat features and polls in order to boost customer service and sales.

On top of the website, Lina Trivedi innovated other marketing tactics still used today. Less than a year after the Beanie Babies website launched, Trivedi decided to put a call to action with the URL directly on the hang tags. They read, "Visit our web page!!! https://www.ty.com." This decision made Ty Inc. one of the first companies to promote their website on the products, commonly done by modern toy companies. She also decided to integrate information on Beanie retirements into a forty-minute-long animation. Commercials already existed on TV long before this; however, Trivedi made the innovative choice to put the advertisement into a show available on the internet.

Related: The Beanie Bubble Review

Lina Trivedi's career has gone in several different directions after leaving Ty, Inc and the end of The Beanie Bubble. She founded a web design agency in Chicago, which included creating sites for the likes of Spice Girls and Motley Crüe and was named among the top web design companies in Chicago at the time. According to Trivedi's LinkedIn, in 2014, she created a patent-pending artificial intelligence (A.I.) writing tool that sold over a million dollars in licensing deals within 60 days. She also founded two more new companies: WordBotic, a software programming company, and Enai Inc., a technology development and marketing company. Much of her work focuses on coding software and furthering the abilities of A.I.

Sources: The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, Lina Trivedi LinkedIn

Dani Kessel Odom (they/them) works as a Core Features Shift Writer for Screen Rant. Prior to this position, Dani worked in the writing and editing business for nine years. Some of their notable work includes writing and editing as a freelancer and running their own website. They've published many feature articles and reviews for film and tv. Additionally, they received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Colorado–Denver in English Writing with a minor in Psychology. They took courses on filmography and scriptwriting which further sparked their love of everything pop culture.Pop culture has been a deep passion for Dani since a young age. Dani has always considered themself a nerd and geek. They started cosplaying as a teenager, and they've continued to this day. On any given day, you can find them binge-watching Marvel, horror flicks, and true crime shows. They'll ramble about their new favorite show at any given time. Dani's other passions include acting, psychology, LGTBQ+ topics, and music. They enjoy incorporating these topics into their writings about film and tv. Outside of writing and editing, Dani runs a wood-burning business called Nebulous Creations. They do custom art pieces for customers and craft fairs. Often, they upload art videos to TikTok showing off the process. Their art often focuses on the characters and franchises from tv and movies that they love.