The story of Tupperware has all the ingredients that could make a movie or miniseries script, but without a happy ending. A protagonist who achieves the American dream of having a successful business after several failures, a woman who ends up paying for the success obtained by her work, professional jealousy, a product that becomes an icon and a bankruptcy from which it seemed possible to save itself almost at the last moment, but which has finally arrived.
It all began with Earl Tupper, born in 1907 in Berlin, a town in New Hampshire (USA). Little Earl grew up with his family on different farms in the neighbouring state of Massachusetts, and at just ten years old he began selling the harvest’s products door to door. He was a dreamer who aspired to go down in history thanks to his inventions and, in fact, compared himself to Leonardo da Vinci. In his diary he wrote that he was like the Italian genius: penniless, with notebooks full of sketches and a house full of inventions. Some of them were the Tupper bomb, which killed with carbon dioxide, a dagger-shaped comb that was attached to the trousers or an instrument to remove the appendix through the anus. None of them were successful, as Alison Clark tells in her book Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950’s America (1999, Smithsonian Institution Press). Nor did he do well with the gardening business he set up, which ended up bankrupt.
But thanks to that failure, he began working in a plastics factory in the late 1930s. He quickly realised the potential of this material, bought the necessary machinery and founded his own company, Tupper Plastics. He used polyethylene to manufacture part of gas masks for World War II, as well as bowls and containers with airtight lids. The Tupperware was born.
The products’ design and functionality earned them praise in several media reports, but sales were not coming in. Tupper was convinced that if he could demonstrate the virtues of his products to the public, they would end up buying, but he didn’t know how.
This is where the other main character of this story comes into the picture: Brownie Wise, a woman born in Georgia in 1913 who was divorced at the time, had a son and was living in Detroit. To earn some extra money to take care of her child, Wise had started working as a saleswoman for Stanley Home Products. She organized house parties to which she invited other women and showed them her merchandise.
When she learned about Tupperware’s products in the late 1940s, she decided to start selling them in the same way. Gradually, she recruited more women for the same task, so much so that at some point more products were sold at these parties than in stores. Aware of Wise’s success and her good eye for business, Tupperware hired her in the early 1950s and named her vice president of marketing to develop a new division of the company, the home party division. By the middle of the decade, there were about 20,000 people, the vast majority women, in the sales network. Parties became an event in residential neighborhoods across the United States, with housewives having fun with different games: from wearing hats made from household objects to throwing a Tupperware filled with grape juice at each other, thereby demonstrating the strength of the container.
Wise decided to make Florida the company’s sales center. There, dressed mostly in a certain shade of pink that came to identify her, she would greet Tupperware enthusiasts, give out awards to top saleswomen, and hold an annual meeting. Meanwhile, Tupper remained in Massachusetts, researching to develop and create new products at the company’s factory.
Wise’s popularity, funny and friendly with the press and consumers, unlike the more reserved Tupper, grew until she became the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week magazine in 1954. She had become the face of the company. The constant attention to Wise and the incentives he gave to saleswomen exasperated Tupper and the relationship between them became strained until she was fired in 1958. Although she sued the company, she only got a severance payment of about $30,000, the equivalent of her annual salary. Shortly after, Tupper sold the company for $16 million, divorced and retired to live in Costa Rica, where he died in 1983.
Wise co-founded three home-delivery cosmetics companies, was president of Viviane Woodard Cosmetics, consulted for various companies and even dabbled in real estate. But she never replicated the success she achieved with Tupperware. She died in Florida in 1992.
In the following decades, there were fewer and fewer parties, more and more competition, and consumers opted for cheaper products that could be purchased in stores or simply with a few clicks from the comfort of their home. The company that had given its name to the containers was fading in the minds of buyers. And its finances were suffering. The pandemic gave the company a break, with more people cooking and eating at home and even having online Tupperware parties. But with the return to normality, sales fell again. There was another glimmer of hope in August 2023, when it became a meme stock. Then, an avalanche of purchases by retail investors caused the company to soar 715% on the stock market in just eight sessions despite being on the verge of bankruptcy. But the return was fleeting and the shares fell again.
The situation has only worsened since then and this week the company filed for bankruptcy. The golden years of Tupper and Wise are now long gone.
A universal brand… whose stock is worth almost zero on the stock exchange
Until a few days ago, Tupperware was a world-renowned container brand, although in decline. A brand that even became a generic name, synonymous with refrigerator containers – the terms “tupper”, “tóper” and “tuper” are found in the RAE dictionary. But the bankruptcy and the collapse of the stock market has brought it to a critical situation. After falling 57% on Monday and 88% on Thursday, the stock recovered on Friday, but still remains at values close to zero. In an environment of volatility, the company as a whole was worth only 3 million dollars in the session. Very far from the highs of 2013 when each share exceeded 90 dollars and had a total value of more than 4 billion.
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