Willa Paskin

This is Planet Money from NPR.

But like in this story is so much stuff that's just really alive and still kicking and just really still with us.

Like it is just this plastic container, you know, like what made it so revered.

Tupperware had the release model cachet of a streetwear brand and the trendiness of, yes, a Stanley Cup, all while making wives and mothers feel good about how they were being wives and mothers. And so it became a behemoth.

Tupperware amassed 20,000 dealers across the country, women who worship Brownie as a sales god, an aspirational lifestyle guru, and who flogged enough Tupperware that the company soon reached $25 million in retail sales, almost $300 million in today's money.

Soon, Brownie, with her incredible story, became the face of the brand, heralded as a single mom revealed to be a sales genius, now leading an army of saleswomen.

Brownie went on talk shows and did interviews for countless magazines. She became the very first woman to appear on the cover of Businessweek. She wrote an entire memoir slash business manual. And the press often credited her with the success of Tupperware.

As the 50s wore on, Earl became increasingly aggravated by Brownie's popularity. Brownie became increasingly aggravated by Earl's micromanaging. They were both trying to grow the company, but they were often at odds, a situation that became prickly and tense over time.

Hi, Jeff. Hi, Planet Money.

The Tupperware Jubilee was an annual over-the-top themed celebration and team-building exercise Brownie had started in the early 1950s. Tupperware dealers and managers would come to Tupperware headquarters on their own dime for an elaborate four-day show of appreciation and indoctrination.

For the 1957 Jubilee, the theme was around the world in 80 days. And the highlight was a massive excursion organized by Brownie.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the thousand-plus attendees all headed off to Brownie's Island in boats, ready to party. But the weather had something else in mind.

Oh my God, it's my honor. Today on the show, the tale of Tupperware. The storage container is a stealthy star of the modern home, but where did Tupperware come from and how did it wind up taking over our lives?

So she gets off.

By the end of the evening, 21 people were in the hospital with serious injuries.

Earl had also already started thinking about cashing out and selling the company. And he did not want a headstrong, self-interested female executive with a lot of pull internally and externally to get in the way.

Earl Tupper fired Brownie Wise in January of 1958. She didn't own any stock or have any stake in the company. She didn't even own the house she lived in. And she never again achieved the kind of success she'd had at Tupperware. Meanwhile, at the end of the year, Earl sold Tupperware to Rexall Drug for $16 million, divorced his wife, and bought his own island off the coast of Panama.

He also renounced his American citizenship to avoid paying taxes. All this means that by 1959, the two people most responsible for making Tupperware Tupperware were no longer at the company. But they had done such a good job establishing the brand that even without them, Tupperware entered a golden age that lasted for decades.

Tupperware, now you're cooking? It's in the 60s and 70s that Tupperware became a fact of American life. It was a useful and popular product, but also an iconic and intimate one that almost everyone had a personal connection to.

But in the 1980s, Tupperware's fortune slowly started to turn. With more and more women in the workforce, the Tupperware party started to seem like a lot of effort just to get something to hold leftover mashed potatoes. And in the years to come, the plastic holding those potatoes became a known health hazard.

The very things that had once been so innovative about Tupperware were starting to hold it back. Still, Tupperware might have been able to survive if not for the competition. But when Earl Tupper's patents ran out, you could buy other perfectly functional food storage containers, often for less, at any store.

You might call whatever container you were buying Tupperware, but strictly speaking, it was not. For years, things were obviously trending in the wrong direction. But it all came to a head in September of 2024.

Tupperware, the brand, still exists, even in a diminished state. It's actually even sold in stores where it competes with its own descendants who are thriving. We're still living in the world that Tupperware built. We are also inhabiting it a little differently.

Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, where she writes a column trying to make sense of consumer culture.

Yeah. I mean, Brownie Wise was like this really, as we say, a proto-influencer and sort of like direct sales appeal. And the

power of just like someone you know or you know maybe you follow on tiktok and feel like you know has not abated all of those things are still a huge part of what's driving sales and what we buy and she figured that all out a really long time yeah i'd be terrified if she had had a tiktok back then she could have taken over the world oh my god i know what would she have done i mean maybe maybe she would have sold less stuff or or she would have taken over the world those those are the choices those are the only two choices

Our original episode of Decoder Ring was reported and produced by Olivia Briley. Decoder Ring is also produced by me, Evan Chung, Max Friedman, and Katie Shepard. Derek John was executive producer. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

And I'm Willa Paskin. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

Amanda is always noticing things. And last year, she became very curious about a strange kind of video that's all over the Internet.

Can you just tell me what a restocking video is?

The hands are disembodied. You can't see who they belong to. And the women rarely talk. They let the containers speak for themselves.

It looks so beautiful, nice and full again. And when you had disarray, you now have order.

This booming genre of video, of people basically pouring pasta into plastic... is fascinating all on its own. But over the years, as Amanda has seen more and more of these videos, a particular aspect of them started to jump out to her. The stars. The storage containers.

Amanda's talking about regular, plain, put your leftovers in them containers. She has some. I have some. I dare say you have some. They're easy to overlook because the focus is usually on what's inside of them. Everything from last night's dinner to, yes, dried pasta and Q-tips and colored pencils. Still, they have become an absolute staple, not just of online videos, but mainstream home decor.

Or as the headline of a piece Amanda wrote for The Atlantic puts it, home influencers will not rest until everything has been put in a clear plastic storage bin.

These containers have crept into every corner of our lives. But it turns out that as modern as some of their uses are, this is not the first time we have lost it over an empty plastic box. They just used to go by another name.

Tupperware is now an old and troubled company, but for years it was a thriving one. And it owes much of that success to an archetype we tend to think of as very contemporary.

Thank you so much. That's very nice. I do consider myself a professional rabbit hole. What is that? Digger?

And the proto-influencer who started that tradition by turning Tupperware into a household name was Brownie Wise.

Bob Keeling is a historian and the author of Tupperware Unsealed.

Brownie was working as a secretary in the suburbs of Detroit, making ends meet, when one day, opportunity called.

So Brownie started selling Stanley Home Products herself.

From the start, she had the thing good salespeople have, where even when they're selling you something, it doesn't feel like they're just trying to sell you something. She seemed authentic. She was warm and fun. And unlike all those male traveling salesmen, she could recommend products to other women as a peer.

Rabbit? A professional rabbit hole rabbit. Yeah, no, we really like love to find things that are sort of hiding in plain sight and then go figure out why they've been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

Soon she was selling a lot of Stanley, which, by the way, is not the same company that makes the current, very popular Big Cup. And she wanted to sell even more. But she hit a wall. Or rather, the man who ran the company.

And so Brownie decided she was going to find something else to sell. A colleague had just pointed out a new product available in department stores. A product created by a chemist named Earl Tupper.

Long before he created his namesake product, Earl was constantly jotting down ideas and sketches in a notebook, like for a fish-powered boat and for pants that wouldn't lose their crease. When the Great Depression hit, he took a job to support his family in a plastics factory in Massachusetts. By the 1940s, he had his own plastics manufacturing company.

And when World War II ended, the multinational chemical company DuPont reached out and asked if Tupper could figure out what to do with this material they'd developed, a hard brown slag product they called polyethylene.

Earl started experimenting with polyethylene, mixing it, processing it, refining it, and eventually he turned it into something brand new.

Earl named this promising new material poly-T and set out to find a use for it. One day, Earl saw a paint can with its resealable lid, and he realized something like that would be really useful for food. At the time, home food storage was very haphazard. 1940s housewives would improvise, sometimes putting leftovers in a bowl and covering them with a shower cap.

Earl saw an opening for something better. And so using his poly-T material, he set about creating a new kind of storage container. Unbreakable, attractive, and with an airtight, resealable lid. He named the resulting product Tupperware. And by 1946, he was ready to start placing his first products, including the pastel-colored Wonderball, in department stores. Where they promptly just...

sat on the shelf.

Not as spicy as they used to be, it turns out.

When Brownie Wise saw Tupperware, she immediately knew how to explain it to her customers, how to make it comprehensible. And also desirable. She started bringing it into women's homes and demonstrating its effectiveness in ways that would blow their minds.

And then Brownie would explain how to seal that very same Wonder Bowl.

You burp a Tupperware just before sealing it completely by pressing down on the center of the lid while holding up one of the corners, forcing a little burp of air out and ostensibly locking in freshness.

This chart of phrase was beyond canny. Brownie knew her audience, wives and mothers in the post-war era who could afford to spend a little more, but felt more virtuous doing so when the exciting new product they were splurging on promised it was also the latest way to take care of their families. Soon, Brownie was selling $2 million worth of Tupperware in today's money.

She wasn't even officially affiliated with the company. But when Tupperware saw her sales figures, that changed. They offered her distribution rights for the entire state of Florida.

Brownie quickly set up a shop in Fort Lauderdale called Patio Parties. Not only was she selling Tupperware herself, but she was also recruiting other women, teaching them her winning sales pitches, and then sending them off to sell Tupperware too. But no one was just knocking on doors.

Brownie had developed a more compelling method, one she'd first learned about from her old company, Stanley, and then honed and improved. She had the Tupperware Party.

Oh, talk about something hiding in your refrigerator right now.

Watch her show the way to use Tupperware's patented seal. A Tupperware party was such a good time, it could obscure that it was also, for at least the women doing the demonstrations, work.

In the late 40s and early 50s, selling Tupperware, something that happened almost entirely in the female sphere, was a socially sanctioned way for women to bring in money, to be a part of the working world, but one in which business degrees and special training were less valuable than

No, I mean, Tupperware is such an amazing and interesting subject because it is really this totally everyday object. Like we all have.

then a wide social circle, an eye for presentation, and the personal experience, charm, and authority to recommend a product.

This kind of direct sales method, which is now everywhere and not always for the good, worked incredibly well. In 1951, Tupperware's owner, Earl Tupper, arranged to meet with Brownie face-to-face for the first time. Soon after, he decided that her sales strategy, the Tupperware Party, would be Tupperware's only sales strategy. Goodbye department stores. Goodbye any stores at all.

And it feels like it's always existed and it feels like it's maybe old fashioned.

He also moved Tupperware headquarters down to Kissimmee, Florida, the state in which Brownie was already located, and gave her a promotion.

The national scaling of these home parties changed everything for Tupperware. This is Tupperware. It became an it product, a modern marvel that was the must-have item of the day. Something I initially, anyway, found a little hard to understand. It's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around the status symbolness of Tupperware because it's pedestrian and plastic and stores food.