One Of The Best Investments You Could Have Made Five Years Ago Was…Build-A-Bear Workshop Stock?

There’s plenty of money to be made in the stock market if you know what you’re doing, and there are many companies that would have provided you with a sizeable return on your investment if you’d purchased some shares in 2020. However, there’s one fairly unlikely brand that’s experienced a shockingly meteoric rise over the past five years: Build-A-Bear Workshop.

It’s been more than 25 years since Maxine Clark, the former president of Payless Shoes, dreamed up the business plan for what was dubbed Build-A-Bear Workshop before opening the first location at the Saint Louis Galleria in 1997.

Clark had planned to turn that interactive toy experience into a franchise from its inception, and that vision quickly came to fruition as the chain rapidly expanded across the United States and beyond en route to becoming a mall staple that boasted close to 150 locations when it debuted its IPO in 2004.

Build-A-Bear shares were initially priced at around $24 and peaked at over $35 by the end of that year. They slowly but surely began to decline when the company became one of the many to fall victim to The Great Recession, and in 2020, the price reached an all-time low of just 86 cents in the immediate wake of the start of the pandemic.

If you had $20 million to spare, you could have basically purchased every single share of a company best known for relying on foot traffic in malls that were already dying before COVID-19 arrived on the scene. However, there weren’t many signs that suggested that would have been the smartest investment.

With that said, anyone who hopped aboard at that point is probably very glad they did.

Build-A-Bear Workshop stock has turned out to be one of the smartest investments you could have made in 2020

If you asked most people what they’d invest in if they had to chance to go back to 2020, they’d likely opt to go with something like Bitcoin or Nvidia, the chipmaker that has reaped the benefits of the crypto and A.I. boom.

Those are certainly two solid options, as the former has seen its value increase by 875% percent over the past five years while the latter has undergone a 1,270% rise over the same span. Those are certainly solid numbers, but they have nothing on the 2,680% spike Build-A-Bear has experienced.

That meteoric ascension was brought to my attention courtesy of investing guru Nate O’Brien, who shared a picture of the chart chronicling Build-A-Bear’s rebound since 2020 that I sort of assumed was fake until I took a look for myself.

Build a Bear Workshop has outperformed pretty much every stock in the last 5 years, including Palantir and Nvidia pic.twitter.com/FrVVwwdTdh

— Nate O’Brien (@nateobrienn) August 28, 2025

According to Stock Analysis, there are only eight other publicly traded companies that would have netted you more money over the past five years if you’d invested in them toward the end of August in 2020.

It’s not shocking to see bioscience, energy, shipping, and tech companies topping that list, but I doubt many people would expect to see a company that specializes in the construction of customizable teddy bears in the top ten.

I acknowledge I’m a bit late to the party here, as there have been plenty of stories chronicling Build-A-Bear’s impressive ability to navigate the pandemic and adapt to a landscape where its physical locations were seemingly on the verge of becoming obsolete.

Only time will tell if the brand will be able to keep the momentum going, but it’s certainly nothing to scoff at.