The Vermont Teddy Bear Company (VTB) is one of the largest producers of teddy bears and the largest seller of teddy bears by mail order and Internet. The company handcrafts each of its teddy bears and produces almost 500,000 teddy bears each year. The company was formerly traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol BEAR, but was taken private by The Mustang Group, a Boston-based private equity firm, on September 30, 2005, partially to avoid the reporting requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. History The company was founded in 1981 by John Sortino, who sold handcrafted teddy bears in an open-air market in Burlington, Vermont. Sortino happened upon the idea of packaging and selling bears through the mail when a tourist visiting Burlington wanted a bear mailed to her home. The concept was called the "Bear-Gram", which features the customized teddy bear placed in a box (complete with an "air hole") and stuffed with other goodies. By 1995, VTB had sponsored on the East Coast various guns-for-bears exchanges and expanded to the West Coast in 1996 starting with UC Irvine's Student Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Brea Police Department. In May 1997, the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. filed a copyright infringement suit against Disney over "Pooh-Grams" being similar to its mail-order "Bear-Gram" trademark and logo. VTB acquired Calyx & Corolla, an upscale flower company headquartered in Vero Beach, Florida, in 2003 but is no longer associated with VTB. One of Vermont Teddy Bear's marketing slogans claimed that sending a teddy bear is "a creative alternative to sending flowers." In 2005, the company launched a new sister company, Gift Bag Boutique, which offered handbags and purses along with many make-up accessories. Along with PajamaGram, which sold gift pajamas, and TastyGram, which offered gourmet food gifts, the creation of this sister company brought the total number of companies under the Vermont Teddy Bear umbrella to five. Gift Bag Boutique and TastyGram stopped accepting orders as of June 26, 2008. For Valentine's Day of 2005, Vermont Teddy Bear caused widespread controversy by offering a "Crazy for You" Bear which wore a white strait jacket with a red heart embroidered and a tag entitled "Commitment Papers" came with the bear. When mental health groups from all over the U.S. asked for the bear to be pulled out of production, VTB kept the bear up for sale but sold out quickly and