She often had several jobs at once and supplemented her income as a saleswoman for Stanley Home Products, arguably the first company in the country to use "home parties" for direct selling. Bright, charming, and driven, Wise had an intuitive grasp of how to sell a product like Tupperware, and she knew how to recruit and motivate other women.
Soon after Tupperware went on the market, Wise and Gary McDonald, another Stanley salesman, realized that home parties were the perfect vehicle for selling the plastic kitchenware.
One day in , Wise called the company to complain about a late order and insisted on speaking to Earl Tupper himself. She told him that he should pull Tupperware out of retail stores and market the product exclusively through home parties.
Intrigued, he invited her to come to his office in Farnumsville, near Leominster, and hired her on the spot. He split the company into two divisions; he ran the manufacturing side, which remained in New England.
Wise took command of the sales division, Tupperware Home Parties. She had moved to Florida and now built a headquarters near her home there. Selling Tupperware appealed especially to women who had family responsibilities, limited resources, and the aspiration to achieve the American dream. 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. I see it as a great strategy to get into multi-channel selling, even as they over the several years had created a proven channel of their own i.
In fact, this is the only way forward in a market that has undergone a big change. With the multi-channel approach, Tupperware India has now enhanced its footprint significantly, reaching to over 1, locations across major as also Tier II and III cities. Though before pandemic, the company had planned to set up around stores by the end of this calendar year, it has now curtailed the number to around stores.
Most importantly, all its stores are franchise-run stores, by women entrepreneurs. The company has currently distributors that too are primarily run by women.
Despite the fact that the company has now added other sales channels to its sales armoury, it has still continued to generate 80 per cent of its sales from its core channel of direct selling, and in the remaining 20 per cent, 12 per cent is coming from e-commerce platform and 8 per cent from offline stores. We will continue with our same DNA of empowering women.
Tupperware helped me in exploring and bringing out the hidden strength and confidence in me. Till , she was a counsellor at a hospital and was finding it difficult to pursue her career with her three-year-old child. She joined Tupperware as a sales consultant and subsequently became one of its top distributors and currently she boasts of a sales force of over 2, women.
The woman in me not only gained huge financial strength but also recognition and awards for my dedication. While the company has reinvented itself on the sales front embracing multiple channels for sales, the company has also introduced a series of measures to boost its production facility at Dehradun and the overall supply chain.
Having suffered a complete shutdown during the initial two months of lockdown, the company has now restored it to over 70 per cent and, maintaining all safety measures among its workers. The company has gone in for a greater degree of automation which has not only minimised the degree of human intervention but also helped increase the productivity level.
They have introduced QR code also. Our Indian operation has been at the forefront of designing and developing many such products which eventually gets into our global portfolio. Our recent strategy to get into multi-channel selling is also something that is done for the first time in the world. Tupperware India, which has got in its portfolio over SKUs across its dry storage, bottles and lunch boxes, was the first to develop and introduce a line of bottles of various configurations for the Indian market five years ago and thereafter the line was adopted in other parts of the world as well.
Similarly, lunch and tiffin boxes were also introduced by the company for the first time in India. The company has designed and developed a line for containers for bulk storage, dedicated to the Indian market. Now the company is planning to introduce steel containers and lunch boxes for the Indian market as consumers are showing some sort of inhibition towards using plastics.
The company is also getting into consumables like sanitizer, disinfectant and dish wash in a Covid afflicted market, even as the production of these products are outsourced to a third party. While the overall Rs10,crore market is growing at around 6 per cent, the organised portion i. Out of the million households in the country, Tupperware India targets the niche premium segment of 35 million households.
The company is now using per cent recyclable packaging which is not only safe for the environment but has passed all safety tests conducted across India, Brazil and Indonesia. The new packaging will keep the product safe in extreme climatic conditions across locations, including warehouses, point of sale outlets and even in transit. With all these activities and measures in place, Tupperware India is getting back on track after almost five-six years of challenging period when the global brand saw its sales falling relentlessly in a market that continued to grow in the back of changing demographics and improving macro-economic indicators.
The strategy has already started yielding desired results to the company which now under the new leadership looks more proactive and agile. Backed by a strong brand and quality products, the company is now all geared up to not only restore its position in the market but also strengthen its footprint in the premium kitchen and homeware markets in India.
The partnership aims to provide volunteering and educational support to those who have relocated to urban cities from villages.
The public sector company is planting a tree for every retail customer visit during its TreeCheers campaign period. Wise's home party system used a sales force of independent consultants who earned a flat percentage of the goods they sold and won incentives in the form of bonuses and products. Wise, together with Gary McDonald, another Stanley veteran, created the Tupperware Jubilee, an annual sales convention that became famous and provided a format for the conventions of numerous direct-selling companies.
Sales skyrocketed, multiplying 25 times within three years. By the late s Tupperware had become a household name. With almost no advertising, Tupperware had created phenomenal brand awareness.
The company's rapid success can be attributed to its recruitment of almost 9, independent consultants by , most of them women, and their enthusiastic spread of Tupperware parties. Able to schedule the parties around their home and family responsibilities, women could earn extra cash and get together with friends and neighbors at the same time.
In addition, the home party plan provided a milieu in which women were trusted as salespeople, unlike door-to-door sales, where women were not accepted at the time. In Wise resigned from her vice-president position and Tupper sold the company to Rexall Drug. Despite the change in management the company continued to thrive. Throughout the s and s sales and earnings doubled every five years.
The company had grown not only in the United States but also had entered and thrived in several foreign countries. Tupperware's first venture outside the United States was to Canada in International sales became a significant source of revenue for Tupperware in the s, and Rexall Drug, which had become Dart Industries, had changed the subsidiary's name to Tupperware International.
Sales exceeded the half billion dollar mark in Four years later Dart Industries and Kraft Inc. Tupperware's growth slowed in the early s, however, and by the subsidiary had cut seven percent from its sales and lost 15 percent from its earnings. Several factors contributed to the slip in sales and earnings. Competition had increased from Rubbermaid Inc. In addition, an economic recovery had allowed many part-time sales people to find full-time work elsewhere, and the movement of women into the workforce had dried up the company's source for part-time labor and limited the time many women had to attend parties.
The company exacerbated the labor problem, however, by not enticing people with higher commissions and by lowering the quality of their bonus prizes. Tupperware finally took action, bringing in a new management team in Jackson from the company's Duracell battery division to the chairmanship of Tupperware. Having made significant improvements in the Duracell division, Jackson was expected to help turn Tupperware around.
Jackson immediately made several changes. To bolster slipping party attendance, he loosened the rules governing parties and allowed adaptations to the parties that would appeal to working women, such as shorter parties and parties thrown at the workplace.
In addition, Jackson worked to improve Tupperware's training of its salespeople and eliminated any bonuses and sales incentives that appeared ineffective.
Over the next couple of years Jackson instituted further changes. The company introduced its first catalog, which was sent out only in response to requests made to its toll-free number. In addition, national print and television advertising was stepped up to help counteract competition from Rubbermaid and other retail product lines. To improve the company's delivery speed, Tupperware built several new warehouses and a large distribution center.
New products in the mids helped boost both sales and company morale. In Tupperware introduced Ultra 21, a line of cookware to which market research had shown consumers would respond favorably. The company's new microwave cookware did very well and by had shown significant growth. Other products, including the company's traditional storage containers, struggled merely to maintain their sales figures. In Dart and Kraft reversed their ill-fated merger. Dart renamed itself Premark International Inc.
Tupperware apparently responded well to the change. Progress at Tupperware was uneven over the next several years.
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