Last night hubby and I watched an American Experience documentary about the Tupperware company and their selling technique of home parties.
Now, when hubby first said he wanted to watch a show on Tupperware, I was frankly uninterested. Tupperware has been an constant and uninteresting part of my life since I was born, actually. My mother was a Tupperware sales lady and so every home I’ve ever lived in has had plenty of Tupperware in the cupboards. When hubby and I got together and I realized he’d left his previous relationships WITH THE JOINT PROPERTY TUPPERWARE I went around for a year saying, “Always hook up with the one who got the Tupperware.” Because, well, Tupperware IS sweet. The product does deliver and as a woman using a 30+ year old set of Tupperware cannisters, I can testify to it personally.
But back to the history lesson. Tupperware was invented by this guy named Tupper who at first tried to sell it at Hudson’s in Detroit (Tupperware was invented in Detroit). Brownie Wise, a divorced mother trying to care for her son, saw the potential for sales networking by women to women. She contacted Tupper and convinced him to sell only through a method she called home parties. Women used their existing network of friends and family to sell in each other’s homes and bring in cash. The show pointed out that many of these women had little education or work experience and Tupperware sales gave them the opportunity to become financially successful.
Now Brownie was the Queen of Sales. A woman from dirt poor Georgia, she had both poise, charisma, and sales genius. Every year she brought the Tupperware sales ladies to Florida for lavish, themed parties. PBS interviewed numerous women who had attended these parties on specially designed grounds in Florida with wishing wells and gardens and pagodas and won things like double-boilers and furs and clothes in between heavy-duty sales talk. The parties were a hit.
A fight between Tupper and Brownie left Brownie on the high road with a severence check for $35,000 while he sold the company later that year for $16 mil. She died in obscurity in 1992 and today has been written out of official corporate history despite her instrumentality in their early success.
Thank you, Brownie, for inventing and fighting for a means by which average women could make an income through effort alone in the 1950’s and far beyond.
Oh, and my mom asks me to remind you that despite all my pretty talk and sudden fascination with Brownie Wise, selling still sucks.
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