Vermont Teddy Bear Company    

MGT 485

        The Vermont Teddy Bear Company was established 1981 by John Sortino.  Mr. Sortino’s dream was to create a high quality stuffed teddy bear, which was produced in the United States. Mr. Sortino learned to sew and took art classes. With these new skills, he began to manufacture a line of bears.  By the end of the first year, over 200 bears were sold and different features were being added to the bear line such as having movable joints and being machine washable.

        The Vermont Teddy Bear Company became incorporated in the State of New York in 1984.  The company began to market the bears in department stores and opened its own store in 1985.  Before Valentines Day of 1985, the company began a new marketing technique, which allowed customer to send a “bear gram” by calling a 1-800 number.  This pushed The Vermont Teddy Bear Company into a mullion dollar company.  In 1991, a new manufacturing factory had to be established in order to handle the demand.  The company was now on a roll winning multiple business awards such as “Best of America” small business award and Heritage of New England Customer Service award.

        In 1994, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company had grown so much in such as small period of time. At this time John Sortino recognized the need in order to reorganize the company from an entrepreneurial company to professionally managed organization. At this time, he resigned as Chief Executive Officer of the company. He was trying to prepare the company so that a new CEO with experience in this system would be able to flourish.   In 1995, Patrick Burns became the New CEO of the company. Mr. Burns and a new chief Finance Officer, Elisabeth Robert began new strategies for the company. They began to open more stores and produced an expanded catalog, at the same time they cut back on advertising for the bear grams.  This diminishment in profits caused Mr. Burns stepped down and Elisabeth Burns became the new CEO of the company.  

Join now!

External Factors

In order to determine the external Factors that face the Vermont Teddy Bear Company the use of the Five Forces model of Porter is needed. This model is an outside-in business tactic tool that is used to make a study of the value of an industry structure. The Competitive Forces study is made by the identification of 5 basic competitive forces:

 The entry of competitors- The Teddy bear manufacturing business will can be entered easily as many consumers are not particular to name brands. However quality is a factor as many of these toys are ...

This is a preview of the whole essay