First "business-to-consumer" website Lina Trivedi was a college student when she worked at Ty Inc. She approached Warner to talk about a new development that existed on college campuses called the
Internet. She indicated that, while the Internet was primarily a research tool, college students were starting to make personal
websites. She thought that creating a website for Beanie Babies could present an unprecedented opportunity to engage the market. She brought to Ty's office a
14.4k modem and demonstrated how the Internet works. Warner was intrigued and gave Trivedi a free license to create a website using her judgment and skills. By the time the first iteration of the Ty website was published in late 1995, only 1.4% of Americans were using the Internet. The population of people using the Internet grew exponentially in the following years, along with the popularity of Beanie Babies. Ty was the first business to produce a
direct-to-consumer website. This was a major contributing factor to the early and rapidly growing popularity of
Beanie Babies. All Beanie Baby hangtags had the website
URL and a
call to action printed underneath the poems and birthdays that commanded audiences to visit the company website with text that read "Visit our web page!!!" This effort evolved into the world's first
Internet sensation. ==Fundraising==