Tupperware: the very word conjures up the white picket fences of 1950s America. Launched into a world where women wore pinnies, daddy was breadwinner and rosy-cheeked children skipped home to eat Mom’s home-baked apple pie, these plastic storage containers changed the modern kitchen and sparked an extraordinary social revolution.
They came to symbolise the material abundance of America’s post-war suburbia – on every Formica kitchen surface, a Tupperware container stood beside the Bakelite radio.
In British homes, too, Tupperware came to symbolise a homely, wholesome way of life. And while its name is now more likely to generate mirth or nostalgia, its somewhat kitsch appeal was enlivened by the discovery that the Queen keeps her breakfast cereals in Tupperware containers.
It changed the way we shopped. By the mid-1950s, the Tupperware party had been born, turning the world’s housewives into mini-moguls.
Women would gather in a hostess’s home, where they were shown – and sold – the delights of Wonder Bowls, Ice-Tup Molds and Party Susans.
In turn, a clever hostess could make a fortune, liberating her from the kitchen sink and introducing her to the world of hard commerce.
Now, a new movie, Tupperware!, will tell the story of this iconic brand. A Broadway musical, Sealed for Freshness, is also due to open next month.
So where did Tupperware come from? The story starts with Earl Tupper, a small-time inventor, born in New Hampshire in 1907. Despite having only a cursory education, his quirky intelligence was soon apparent.
TAt ten, he started a business selling the family’s farm produce door-to-door. He scribbled down his eccentric innovations – they included a better garter, a dagger-shaped comb clipped to your belt and a new procedure for removing a burst appendix.
His design for a ‘fish-powered boat’ used three clamps to harness a large fish to tow the vessel.
Tupper tried to sell his inventions all over the country, but received rejections by the dozen. After his landscaping and nursery business went bust in the Great Depression, he joined the plastics division of chemical company DuPont.
Back then, this new-fangled material was brittle and had an unpleasant odour. But the more Tupper learned about plastic, the more he was convinced that it would take over the world.
He experimented and discovered a more user-friendly, lighter plastic. Flexible and odour-free, he shaped it into small tubs and cartons. Tupperware was born.
Tupper’s first containers came on the market in 1945; two years later, the patented Tupperware seal – modelled on a paint tin lid – was added.
They were not, alas, an instant success. Housewives were unused to plastic and unable to work the special airtight ‘burping’ seal that forced air out of the container to help preserve its contents.
And there the dream might have ended were it not for a gutsy single mother from Detroit, called Brownie Wise.
Divorced and hard up, she had been hosting small parties to sell brushes and cleaning equipment to help pay for her young son’s medical bills. Now she set about building a network of housewives dedicated to selling Tupperware from their homes.
She paid her eager saleswomen commission in return for organising gatherings of their friends where Tupperware could be demonstrated.
Suburban 1950s housewives were often isolated and bored.
A marketing genius, Wise was able to make the selling of Tupperware ladylike, liberating and fun. The parties became a form of networking and entertainment, with women playing fun games such as Write An Honest Advert To Sell Your Husband.
By 1951, Tupper had stopped selling in shops entirely and had made 40-year-old Wise head of home sales.
Together, their joint riches grew. Where Tupper was reclusive, Wise was outgoing. He knew how to produce things; she knew how to sell.
Wise relished every minute of her success. She drove a pink Cadillac, dyed her pet canary pink, and was the first woman to be photographed for the cover of Business Week ? seated on a peacock throne.
But the more flamboyantly she behaved, the more resentful Tupper became. A sober, rather puritanical man, he was deeply disapproving of her excesses, and in 1958 he abruptly sacked her, declaring that she had betrayed the company ethos and endangered its reputation.
He said she had been observed using a Tupperware dish as a dog bowl in her luxury home. It went against his ethos of the product as a hygienic way to store food.
Despite her departure, the Tupperware empire grew, and in 1960 the firm set off to conquer Britain. The timing was perfect: burgeoning consumer wealth, an upwardly mobile society and the creation of suburbia meant that the nation’s women were ready for Tupperware parties.
The gatherings proved exactly the right vehicle for Sixties’ housewives to show off their new dresses and hairstyles, and to swap gossip – and the product itself was an instant hit.
In 1965, the influential fashion magazine, Queen, gave Tupperware its seal of approval, lauding it as ‘the greatest revolution in household consumer goods since the Phoenicians invented glass’. Tupperware had well and truly arrived.
The parties themselves would decline in popularity only in the late 1970s, with the advent of the all-women, alcohol-fuelled Ann Summers parties, selling erotic lingerie and sex toys. These reduced Tupperware parties to something of a joke – and a dated one at that.
Tupperware’s shine would recover in Britain only after it was revealed in 2003 – by an undercover reporter who infiltrated Buckingham Palace ? that the Queen stores her breakfast cereals in Tupperware containers.
Ever since, there has been a renaissance, with retail sales increasing by 80 per cent last year.
The parties have been relaunched as ‘girls night out’ evenings, where the women make cocktails and talk about the problems they’re having with their husbands.
Today, a Tupperware party takes place somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds, and often brings with it great wealth. In post-Soviet Russia, the firm has an army of saleswoman, many of them earning more than £50,000 a year.
As for Tupper, he sold the company in 1958 to the Rexall Drug Company for $16 million and moved to Costa Rica to avoid tax. He died a broken man in 1983 after his later inventions ? including a laundry device for travelling salesmen ? failed to take off.
Ironically, that year, Tupperware became the world’s biggest direct seller with annual sales of £620 million.
By ZOE BRENNAN
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-429672/How-Tupperware-conquered-world.html#ixzz0kiEpJzxE
