Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950’s America

[Earl] Tupper's choice of [Brownie] Wise to organize the new distribution scheme proved fundamental to the success of Tupperware. Dynamic and capable, she convinced Tupper that the key to the success of the product lay in her imaginative and tenacious approach to party plan sales and her understanding of women's needs as housewives, consumers, and part-time workers. The success of her own company, Patio Parties, which as the name suggests appealed to leisurely, suburbun notions of modern living, certainly substantiated her claims. Wise and her mother, Rose Humphrey, organized hostess parties to sell goods as diverse as the “ketchup pump,” “the ashtray with a brain,” and “Atomite: the cleaner with ATOMIC-like action.” As an ideal gift and novelty with contemporary design appeal, Tupperware perfectly suited Wise's clever buying policy. Like the hostess party gatherings themselves, the products that she chose appealed to a new-found modernity. Items such as the hand-size “Sunny” featherweight hair dryer (available in “colors as pretty as your cosmetic box: capri, coral, bermuda blue, sahara sand”) invoked a provocative allure to a home shampoo; easily mountable on the wall “for those last-minute dashes, ‘Sunny’ will dry your hair as you polish your nails and then dry your nails, too!” Wise's immense business acumen and intuitive understanding of feminine popular culture, gift-giving, and attainable glamour would carry the hostess party, and Tupperware, to new dimensions.