Princess the Bear (PE Pellets, China, No Space)

Princess made in China with the no-space swing tag but a P.E.-filled tush tag is the version that started an argument among collectors that is still going. It is also the cheapest of the family, selling in a recorded range of $8 to $13 with a median of $11.

Ty filled the earliest Princess bears with P.V.C. pellets and switched to P.E. across his whole Beanie Baby line during the same window Princess was in production. Sometime between late 1997 and early 1998, no-space China bears turned up with the newer P.E. tush tag attached, and collectors have never agreed on what that means: a straightforward pellet changeover, factory workers using up leftover no-space tags after the switch, or something else. No hard production record settles it.

Some collectors treated the P.E. tush tag as a mistake and went looking for it as an oddity in its own right, which for a time pushed interest in this version above what the plain P.V.C. no-space bear got. That interest has not held. Today it is the least expensive no-space China Princess of the two pellet types.