Stuti Gokhale
Apple TV+’s ‘The Beanie Bubble‘ is a comedy-drama movie that revolves around the incredible true story of Ty Inc., a company that created Beanie Babies, a unique series of small plush toys that became a nationwide cultural phenomenon in the 80s and 90s. More than the toys, the Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash directorial focuses on the life of Ty Warner, the man who created them, and the uncredited ladies behind the whole operation. It includes Maya Kumar (Geraldine Vishwanathan), his brilliant young assistant who soon takes Ty Inc. to newer levels of success with her marketing acumen. Since the movie’s storyline and protagonist are partially based on real-life events and people, it begs the question — is Maya an actual Ty Inc. employee? Well, here’s what we found!
Beanie Babies’ Real Brain: Lina Trivedi Inspires Maya
While the makers have not explicitly confirmed whether Maya Kumar is based on a real-life individual, the actual inspiration behind the character has herself confirmed the same. The character is reportedly a fictionalized representation of Lina Trivedi, a software engineer and designer and former Ty Inc. employee who introduced the company to online sales and, consequently, was a significant contributor to the enormous success of the Beanie Babies in the market. Not just that, she introduced the idea of writing poems and including birthdays on the iconic tags attached to the toys, which endeared them to the masses.
An Addison, Illinois, native of Indian American origin, Lina majored in Sociology at DePaul University, graduating in 1997. In 1992, she began working at Ty Inc. as their 12th employee at a mere $12 per hour wage. Around two years after the launch of Beanie Babies in 1993, she approached the company’s President, Ty Warner, with a unique idea. Lina suggested giving a more personal touch to the toys by writing engaging poems on the tags, prompting him to entrust her with writing all the poems and designing the insides of over 100 tags.
Given Lina’s entrepreneurial skills and experience using the internet, which was relatively new then, she also suggested creating a website for Beanie Babies to impact the consumer market differently. Impressed with her demonstration, Warner assigned her to design and handle the website, and its first version was launched in 1995. In the following years, Lina’s online marketing strategies helped create massive demand for the products online, contributing exponentially to sales.
On top of it, Lina introduced and coordinated the retiring and new Beanie Babies characters in the market, even launching interactive campaigns to engage the customers. In the meantime, she also worked with the Children’s Advertising Review Unit to build and establish regulations to protect children’s privacy online. After successfully contributing for five years to Ty Inc. and the Beanie Babies craze, Lina retired from the company as its Director of Technology in 1997. That same year, she started her own web design agency, going on to design websites for famous corporations and even celebrities.
Lina Trivedi is an Entrepreneur and Innovator Today
In 1998, Lina Trivedi’s web design agency was named one of Chicago’s top design firms by Crains Chicago Business. Later, she expanded her portfolio as part of a team that developed the first real-time credit card application processing technology Citibank launched in 1999. The following year, Lina was named one of the top 30 Chicago area entrepreneurs under 30 by the Chicago Sun-Times. From 2006 to 2009, she worked for the National Urban League as part of the Workforce and Economic Development Team.
In this role, Lina helped create job opportunities for the underprivileged, developing an Affirmative Selection concept, enabling employers to create pools of candidates based on economic disadvantage rather than race. From 2005 to 2008, she was the Minority Representative in the Community Services Commission and the Community Development Block Grant Commission. Adding another feather to her cap in 2007, Lina founded WordBiotic, an AI tool that can generate up to 10,000 words of original content based on a series of prompts, helping writers express themselves better.
Apart from her career in technology, the entrepreneur has authored three books, namely ‘9 Catastrophic Mistakes in Business’ (2011), ’11 Rules for Efficiency’ (2012), and ‘Lessons Learned as a Special Needs Mom’ and several online articles. On the personal front, Lina is a doting single parent to her daughter, Nikhita, whom she welcomed in 2010. The little girl was diagnosed with Goltz Syndrome at birth, a rare genetic skin disorder, and became the youngest child in the US to receive a prosthetic leg at seven months of age.
Lina has not just spoken about her experiences as a single mom to a child with special needs in her third book but has even inculcated her entrepreneurial skills in Nikhita. In 2023, she co-founded Enai Inc., a Sacramento, California-based AI start-up that specializes in technology development and marketing — the skills that cemented her position decades ago at Ty Inc. Currently, Lina resides in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, with her daughter and continues achieving newer milestones in life. From what it seems, she is pretty pleased with her representation in ‘The Beanie Bubble’ as Maya and is happily promoting the movie on her social media.
Read More: The Beanie Bubble: Is Linda Wallace Based on a Real Person?
