The company’s direct-sales model didn’t factor in that women might actually be successful in the workplace.
Tupperware’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week prompted many of us to do a double-take. Tupperware had so dominated the business of storing leftover food for so long that the company name more or less became a common noun, used to describe even food storage containers made by other companies. A restaurant gives me a plastic bin for my pad thai? That’s Tupperware. Another business sells me a set of containers for my fridge? That’s Tupperware. Yet here was the actual Tupperware, busted.
In some ways, this is regular old bankruptcy. The immediate cause was that Tupperware had more than $800 million in debt, and the company was only worth a fraction of that. Tupperware is yet another legacy business that didn’t keep up with the times. It became Toys “R” Us for leftover mashed potatoes, or Bed Bath & Beyond for baked brisket, and now its creditors will pick through the ashes.
Tupperware sat at the intersection of a handful of shifts in how Americans see themselves and conduct their business. When those changes—ahem—stacked atop each other, Tupperware cracked.
Tupperware was a whale of an idea. In 1946, inventor Earl Tupper built a plastic container that could seal easily and keep food fresher for longer. He patented the “burping seal” to quickly let out air and facilitate a clean, tight clench. In the next handful of years, Tupperware became a pioneer of direct selling. One customer would discover the gospel of leftovers that didn’t go stale for several days, and that customer would sell more containers to friends in exchange for a commission. It was an innovation.
“You talk about relationship marketing, you talk about built-in trust, it’s all there,” Hank Boyd, a clinical professor of marketing at the University of Maryland’s business school, told me. “Who wouldn’t want to buy something from a friend or a neighbor saying, ‘Hey, I vouch for this. I can show you how great and wonderful having Tupperware in your life is.’ And of course it became part of the American fabric.”
Direct selling was a precursor to affiliate marketing, where websites get commissions for click-throughs that lead to sales. And it was arguably the foundation of the influencer economy, too. What is a product recommendation Instagrammer if not a Tupperware party hostess for the digital age?
But physical, face-to-face direct selling of merchandise is increasingly a relic, and the entire direct selling industry is tiny. The global industry trade group, the World Federation of Direct Selling Associations, reported that all of the direct retail sales in 2023 totaled less than $170 billion. That’s about a third of Walmart’s sales. The U.S.-focused Direct Selling Association reports that the direct selling industry has gotten bigger over the past decade thanks to wellness and service businesses, while home products have declined. We are not living in boom times for the model Tupperware relied on.
Plus, the nature of who was doing that direct selling for Tupperware has made the problem a lot worse. Tupperware’s ascent to the top of the market came on the backs of American women who threw parties for their friends and sold food boxes from their living rooms. One ingenious marketer, Brownie Wise, came up with the Tupperware party and turned it into a national juggernaut with a simple pitch: Shilling these storage containers was a way for women to have fun and make money in a way that felt socially appropriate, even upscale, for the time. “In the 1950s and 1960s, it was a great way for entrepreneurial women to say, ‘Yes, I might be a homemaker, but at the same time, this allows me to raise my kids and make some income off the side,’ ” Boyd said. “So it was a win-win across the board.”
American women have since found more work that is not hosting parties to sell Tupperware. This has been a good thing for society but not so much for Tupperware, which never did get a great handle on how to sell its products in more modern ways. The company said in its bankruptcy filing that direct selling still drove more than 90 percent of its sales in 2023, with about 465,000 sellers, mostly women, comprising the Tupperware sales force. The pandemic did not help the fading customer-to-customer sales business. Company executives expressed hopes that a post-pandemic lust for hanging out in person again would lead to some degree of revival, but evidently it didn’t lead to a big one.
If it seems like Tupperware paid too much attention to a declining business model without girding itself for the new world, that’s because it did. As the company’s chief restructuring officer explains in the bankruptcy filing: “The company’s focus on its direct sales model ultimately came at the cost of developing an omnichannel strategy, or even modern e-commerce infrastructure to support its Sales Force.”
