When was tupperware invented

Stanley salespeople hawked their wares by recruiting a housewife to host a party for her friends and acquaintances. At the party, the salesperson demonstrated Stanley products—mops, brushes, cleaning products, etc. A lot of people attend only out of guilt or a sense of obligation to the host and buy just enough merchandise to avoid embarrassment.

The same was true in the late s: People could buy cleaning products anywhere, which made it kind of irritating to have to sit through a Stanley demonstration just because a friend had invited them. Even the Stanley salespeople knew it, and that was why growing numbers of them were adding Tupperware to their Stanley offerings.

Tupperware was no mop or bottle of dish soap. It was something new, a big improvement over the products that had come before it. They bought a lot of it, too: Tupperware sold so well at home parties that many Stanley salespeople were abandoning the company entirely and selling nothing but Tupperware. One of the most successful of the ex-Stanley salespeople was a woman named Brownie Wise. In April , he hired Wise and made her a vice president of a brand-new division called Tupperware Home Parties, headquartered in Kissimmee, Florida.

Tupper also pulled Tupperware from department stores. Clearly, it needed to be demonstrated, and once it was, people bought it. It was great for the company, too, because the sales force Brownie Wise was building cost it almost nothing. Like the Stanley team before them, they were independent salespeople who earned a percentage of their sales. The party plan was also good for the housewives who sold Tupperware. Selling Tupperware offered housewives a chance to develop business skills, make their own money, and earn recognition they seldom got from cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their kids.

It was even possible to make a lot of money selling Tupper-ware. Top-performing Tupperware ladies were promoted to manage other Tupperware ladies, and if the husband of a top-performing manager was willing to quit his job and join his wife at Tupper-ware, the couple could be awarded a lucrative distributorship and transferred across the country to open up new territories.

In a public relations firm told Earl Tupper that he should make Brownie Wise the public face of the company. Tupper, who was so reclusive that few company employees even knew what he looked like, happily obliged. In the years that followed, the Tupper-ware publicity department built Wise into an idealized Tupperware lady, giving her an Oprah Winfrey-like status with her sales force. One of the biggest draws of Jubilee was a chance to meet Brownie Wise.

And each year she awarded refrigerators, furs, diamond jewelry, cars, and other fabulous prizes to her top performers. But some of the most coveted prizes of all were the dresses and other outfits that Wise selected from her personal wardrobe and awarded to a very lucky few. Earl Tupper was a gifted engineer but a difficult man with no interest in or knack for public relations.

Brownie Wise quickly became the face of the company. It was a face that would soon have thousands of followers, who would sell millions of dollars worth of Tupperware. The Tupperware sales force was made up almost entirely of married women, many of whom had entered the work force during the war and wanted to maintain some of the independence and earning power they had gained. Giving Tupperware parties offered a woman the chance to work, and in many cases, earn good money, on a schedule she could control and in a setting that allowed her to maintain her role as homemaker.

Thousands of women signed on to be "Tupperware Ladies," as the sales representatives were called; they sold as much as Tupper's factories could produce. Many others lived in rural communities. Brownie Wise inspired her managers and sellers to work hard and believe in themselves.

According to Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, who wrote, produced, and directed the prize-winning documentary "Tupperware! She recognized, indeed celebrated, women who got very little of either elsewhere in their lives, and they loved her for it. As the Tupperware Company grew, Brownie Wise appeared on talk shows, was quoted by newspapers, and was the first woman ever featured on the cover of Business Week.

On January 28, , he fired her. She had been a well-paid employee, but always just an employee. After her dismissal, Wise started a company to sell cosmetics at house parties. It failed almost immediately, and she lived out the rest of her life in obscurity. Today, almost 60 years since Tupperware was first introduced to American consumers, the company does business in over countries.

One can buy the original "burping bowl" at a Tupperware party anywhere in the world, or online, at any time of day or night. Leominster, Massachusetts, where Tupper based his early operations, was for many years a hub of plastics manufacturing. The current site of the Blackstone Valley Boys and Girls Club served as a site for Tupperware manufacturing between the late s and s.

The site included a acre park for Tupperware employees and their families. On this day in , the first edition of the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook was published. On this day in , shoppers in Springfield became the first Americans to find frozen food in their grocery stores.

A test marketing program was designed to see if people would buy frozen food. On this day in , a new exhibit opened in Washington, DC. The kitchen in Julia Child's Cambridge home of 32 years had been disassembled and moved to the Smithsonian.

Designed by her husband Paul July 28, Women attend a Tupperware party, hosted to market the new brand of plastic containers. Despite the astounding success of the Tupperware enterprise, which received constant press coverage and design and business accolades, Tupper and Wise held widely differing approaches to the business. Tupper despised large gatherings of people and refused to attend the annual sales rallies known as Homecoming Jubilees, but Wise reigned over her Tupperware dealers with increasingly flamboyant displays of charisma.

These contradictions were indicative not merely of biographical and gender differences, but of the historical shift from the Depression economy to the postwar boom. The Tupperware party, a phenomenon less easily explained by theories of utilitarianism, originated according to corporate anecdote as an expedient way of showing bewildered s housewives how to fit the Tupperware seal securely on their polyethylene containers. The Tupperware corporate culture offered an alternative to the patriarchal structures of conventional sales structures, which many women, completely alienated from the conventional workplace, wholeheartedly embraced.

A Tupperware party in full swing. Wise, a single mom, could see how great Tupperware could be to have in the household and came up with the idea of a Tupperware party.