We try to recover the philosophy of reusing and reducing waste, but we continue in the throwaway society, not just food. We renew clothes, electronic devices or household items too frequently, but there is a brand that survives indelibly in kitchens over the years. who has one lunch box tupperware at home, he has a treasure. And soon maybe one too coveted relic.
Few are the brands that have managed to create a international icon, marking a before and after in the lives of millions of people around the world. Even fewer are those that have linked their name to the product itself, as is the case with less and less frequency in foods such as damage or the bread bimbo. We called them lunch boxes or lunch boxesbut almost everyone knows them as tapers or tupperwaresome reusable containers that changed our lives.
tupperware is an already universal brand whose history adds 77 years old; Looking back and seeing the somewhat old appearance of the older models, they almost seem few to us. It is not strange the feeling that the taper carries with us lifetimealthough, obviously, it could not appear or expand until the democratization of plastic.
The basis of its success lies in taking advantage of all the possibilities offered by this material and an innovative -and complex- design, but it needed a little extra impetus to win over housewives of millions of homes. It sounds sexist, but it is the pure reality: if Tupperware became that icon a thousand times imitated, it is thanks to the figure of the woman in the family home.
The brand is one of those that seems to us destined to survive a century, but not even such a powerful name escapes changes in habits and the unstable economic market. He future of tupperwareas it happened with Duralex, dangerand could disappear.
From the battlefield to the kitchen
Despite the fact that the idea that “táper” comes from “tapa” spreads throughout Spain, this invention simply has the name of its creator. Earl Silas Tupper, better known simply as Earl Tupper, was born in the summer of 1907 on the outskirts of Berlin, New Hampshire (New England, United States). After a childhood and youth in different Massachusetts farmsI study in the Bryant College of Rhode Island before starting his first businesses in the world of landscaping.
The Great Depression frustrated his early career plans, but he was soon able to find work at the dupont chemical companywhere he would have access to the necessary means with which to experiment and create new materials that would be of great use in World War II.
Because the tuppers were not born motivated by a culinary need, but on the battlefield. The war, engine of many inventions and recent advances of humanity, prompted Tupper to come up with a plastic material light, flexible, unbreakable and moldablewhich he would use to design bowls, cups, containers and even gas masks for soldiers.
Once the war was over and after the first post-war years, the fertile ground that would awaken the US economy as a world power in the face of devastated Europe led Tupper to apply its advances to a more practical and everyday terrainthe kitchens of the emerging middle class.
The birth of Tupperware and the fervor of its parties
The visionary Earl Tupper continued to bet on his innovations looking for new applications for that material, which he had achieved after purify polyethylene slag waste from the oil refining process. The airtight lids Based on paint cans, which sucked out some of the air and closed without letting a drop escape, they had many more potential applications.
With a view to growing and expanding, he founded his own company, Tupperware Plastics Company, in 1938, and in 1946 it launched the first two products that would change domestic life forever. Already in 1942 he had managed to mold a injection polyethylene cupand would go on sale shortly after baptized as Bell Tumbler (Bell Vase), along with the Wonderlier Bowleither “Wonder Bowl“. Both have seen many reissues since then but their design has hardly changed, with the Wonderlier as the great icon of the brand and replicated millions of times.
Until then, clay, terracotta and, later, glass containers were used in domestic and professional kitchens. The success of tupperware It would not be, however, immediate, because, as usually happens, we hard to change habits and we are skeptical by nature. At least, we trust until a familiar voice tells us otherwise.
In those days there was no internet influencers to promote the new world of tupperware, but Earl realized his product needed a little boost to make it into the American home. Although they arrived at department stores in 1948, the real success would come directly from the sale on site of their recipients, because everything changed with the collaboration of another visionary entrepreneur, Brownie Wise.
Wise already had experience selling house-to-house cleaning products, and had the good idea to organize gatherings or “parties” from Tupperware inside the homes of potential buyers. Given the good reception of his own concentrations of housewives around the tapers, Wise contacted Tupper and convinced him to change strategy of business. And so they would make history.
Tupperware thus spent the first decades withdrawing from retail to focus on a sales model developed by Wise herself along with Tom and Ann Damigella, known today as party marketing plan, party plan marketing. From the housewives room, to the world.
From world conquest to decline
The success of Tupperware responds to how a functional and revolutionary material arrived to cover specific needs at a very specific moment in life. american society. The economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the baby boom and the growth of the middle classes, with the much mythologized life of the suburbs and the american way of lifetook housewives to watch over their family, to become mothers, wives, cooks and hostesses perfect.
The kitchen developed greatly in those years, receiving all kinds of innovations in terms of appliances, appliances and utensils, but also with new products and ingredients that promised to make life easier for families. with his hermetic sealing and its unbreakable and lightweight design, very easy to wash and transport, housewives could preserve food much better, avoiding waste and also allowing them to transport the dishes to family and neighborhood parties, excursions or outdoor barbecues. Pure American life.
Successful ‘Tupperware parties’ tripled sales in one year
While Tupper continued to strive to develop new models and containers adapted to everyday needs, obsessed with quality, Brownie managed to develop the business by multiplying sales at an outrageous rate, with 20,000 women working for her in 1954, and having tripled sales of the company in just one year.
But the success of the Brownie figure upset Earl Tupper, who felt that it stole the limelight and took too many liberties. In 1958 he fired her permanently, and shortly after he would sell his company to the Rexall company, with Justin Dall at the helm. Tupper would end his days in Costa Rica and renouncing his US citizenship for tax reasons.
Over the decades, Tupperware increased its catalog and expanded throughout the world, adapting to specific needs of other cultureslike the checkout line bento which released in Japan. In recent times they have opted for more modern designs, looking for a more striking range of colors and adapting their containers to trends such as the kitchen in microwavealso gaining ground thanks to trends in healthy food and bringing lunch to the office.
However, in recent times the landscape has changed a lot. The direct sales system it’s already outdated, people have modified their habits of consumption and purchase of products, and, although thanks to their way of manufacturing and long useful life they are sustainable, plastic no longer has such a good reputation. Besides, other giants have entered the gamewith companies like Ikea or retail stores on-line at much cheaper prices cornering the market.
The company’s shares have plummeted
The company’s shares have collapsed in recent years and are urgently looking for investors to bail out the company from the debts they accumulate. Last week it was the company itself that announced the difficult situation which it faces to face the future, and layoffs are already being considered.
An uncertain future
As we mentioned in the case of Duralex, another mythical brand that has seen its future endangered, Tupperware faces a very uncertain future in the short and medium term, since the name and your reputation is not enough to survive in such an aggressive economic ecosystem with so many competitors much more capable of adapting to changing times.
In the same way that the original wrappers succeeded thanks to a happy confluence of factors, a new combination of circumstances could unleash the ultimate Molotov cocktail that sweeps the company. The difficulty in adapting to changes in trends, the strong competitionthe inability to compete on prices and the distance from an increasingly young consumer distant with your product, they cloud the prospects of getting out.
It may be nostalgia of those of us who grew up with Tupperware products at home, the savior of the brand, as has already happened with Duralex. Its older models still arouse the collector’s lust and lover of vintagebut it is also that the original tuppers are still unbeatable.
Tupperware is simply perfect in its simplicity. Of this we can attest to those of us who still use the one that we inherited of our mothers and grandmothers, reusing it shamelessly and without suffering a scratch, stain or defect. He will not be the prettiest, neither modern nor instagrammablenot the cheapest either, but it is the best kitchen container that I personally treasure.
We will have to hold on to those lunch boxes that we still have or invest in those that we can still buy before the brand disappears, if it finally does. No longer out of a collector’s interest or with the idea that they will be revalued in the future, it is that they are, really, the best utensils What can we have in the kitchen?
TUPPERWARE Astral box 300ml bright turquoise (2) + 300ml turquoise (2) 6621
Tupperwares Clarissa for Tupperware fridge, 2 liters dark blue + 1.5 liters blue + 1 liter turquoise, Panorama 27537
Photos | Tupperware – 1950sUnlimited – Philip Pessar
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