As Wise trained more and more Tupperware dealers in the party sales method, she created a group of evangelists eager to connect with women in their homes. She’d throw the plastic across the room to show that it didn’t break, and get friends laughing as they played silly party games that educated them about the product.
#Ordinary housewives hangers and thick nipples galleried how to#
But Wise knew how to demonstrate Tupperware. Divorced and cash-strapped, she had worked as an advice columnist before she took up Tupperware sales. On the surface, Wise was an unusual choice to head up a plastics company’s sales force. “Tupper’s decision to invest wholeheartedly in amateur businesspeople and an informal, peripheral sales activity was either an act of inspired entrepreneurial vision or a reflection of his desperation,” writes historian Alison J. Tupper, who was aware of the success of Stanley Home’s model, decided to hire Wise as his general sales manager in 1951. But Wise and other at-home demonstrators proved that Tupperware could be sold, if its use could be shown correctly. By the end of the 1940s however, business was languishing, in part because the products were so different from other plastics of the time. Tupperware had resisted direct-to-consumer sales from the start, preferring instead to place its products in department stores or use catalog sales. Wise recruited her own sales force from local housewives, and trained them to sell the new plastic goods.
She formed her own business, “Patio Parties,” and began using the model to sell household goods, including Tupperware. One of Stanley Home’s salespeople, Brownie Wise, quickly saw the potential of the method to sell more than cleaning products. Stanley Home parties were a chance for women to buy products from salespeople in their home, not their doorstep, and to do so along with their friends. Around the time that Tupper invented Poly-T, a cleaning products company called Stanley Home had debuted the “home party,” a new method of selling products directly to housewives. The businessman needed a new sales strategy, and quick. The bowls’ most unique feature was also what held it back initially: the airtight lids wouldn’t seal unless they were “burped” beforehand, and that confused consumers, who returned them to stores claiming the lids didn’t fit. At first, homemakers were wary of a material they associated with bad smells, a weirdly oily texture and cheap construction. Tupperware looked nothing like the plasticware that was in most women’s kitchens. Tupperware Parties in the 50s and 60s were a way of marketing the product directly to women. Tupperware was developed by an American, Earl Tupper, in the mid 1940s. It would take an ambitious woman-and an army of amateur salespeople-to sell the innovative containers to America. But at first, nobody understood what they were or how to use them.
Tupper introduced Tupperware after World War II. The Tupperware Home Parties of the 1950s and 1960s were the only way to purchase a line of polyethylene plastic storage containers that were the brainchild of Earl Tupper, a Massachusetts businessman who figured out a way to turn an industrial byproduct into an improvement on plastic he called Poly-T. During the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of women started their own home businesses selling Tupperware, breaking gender stereotypes even as they reinforced them. And the women who participated in them weren’t just stocking their homes: they were experimenting with cutting-edge technology that helped food stay fresh for longer. Although they engaged in lighthearted socializing at living rooms, Tupperware party organizers were running thriving, woman-owned businesses. But Tupperware parties were more than they might seem. Well stocked with punch and cookies, the daytime parties were well mannered affairs. If you peeked into a suburban living room in the 1950s, you might see a group of women in funny hats playing party games, tossing lightweight plastic bowls back and forth and chatting about their lives as they passed around an order form for Tupperware.
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