Tupperware Sat on Shelves for Years. A Single Mother Selling It at Parties Saved the Company.

US2487400 was granted to Earl S. Tupper on November 8, 1949. The title is "Open Mouth Container and Nonsnap Type of Closure Therefor." It describes the Tupperware seal: a flexible lid with a rim that inverts over the container's edge, so that pressing the center forces air out and creates a partial vacuum. Lift the edge and it releases with an audible sigh — the "burp" that became the product's signature.

The engineering behind it was real. Tupper had worked at DuPont and had figured out how to purify polyethylene slag — a black, greasy, foul-smelling industrial waste product — into a material that was translucent, flexible, odorless, and durable. He called it Poly-T. In 1946 he began molding it into food containers with his airtight seal.

It was, objectively, a very good product. Food stayed fresh dramatically longer. The containers did not shatter, leak, or corrode.

Almost nobody bought it.

The problem with the shelf

The failure was one of explanation. A Tupperware container sitting in a hardware store looked like a slightly odd plastic bowl. The whole value was in the seal, and the seal required a demonstration — you had to see someone press the lid, burp the air out, and then turn the container upside down full of liquid without a drop escaping.

Nobody at a store counter was going to do that. Sales through conventional retail were weak for years.

Brownie Wise

Brownie Wise was a divorced single mother in Detroit, supporting herself and her son and her own mother, selling household goods through home demonstration parties for a company called Stanley Home Products. She discovered Tupperware, recognized instantly that it was a demonstration product, and began selling it at parties in living rooms.

Her volume became conspicuous. She was, from a single suburban living-room circuit, outselling entire department stores. When she called Tupper's company to complain about a supply problem, the resulting conversation led to Tupper meeting her — and, in 1951, to a decision that was radical for the era: he pulled Tupperware out of retail stores entirely and sold it exclusively through the home-party system, with Wise running the sales organization as vice president.

Sales exploded. The Tupperware party became one of the defining social and commercial institutions of 1950s America, and it worked on a principle Wise understood better than Tupper did: the demonstration was not really about the plastic. It was a way for women who had no access to conventional careers to earn real money, build a business, and be recognized for it — inside a social form, the ladies' afternoon gathering, that was already permitted to them.

Wise built a national sales force of tens of thousands, almost entirely women, and became, in 1954, the first woman ever to appear on the cover of Business Week.

The ending

In 1958, Tupper fired her. The reasons have been variously reported as a clash of egos, his discomfort with how thoroughly she had become the public face of the company, and his plan to sell the business — which he did that same year, to Rexall, for about sixteen million dollars. He divorced his wife, renounced his US citizenship to avoid taxes, bought an island, and largely disappeared from public life.

Wise received roughly a year's salary. Her subsequent business ventures never approached the same scale, and her name was for decades almost entirely absent from the company's own telling of its history.

The patent was Tupper's. The company was Wise's.

See the original

The full text and figures of US2487400 are on patents.us.