The world is moving on. Tupperware is no longer trendy or fashionable. And it will soon be a thing of the past.
The 77-year-old company, which has been synonymous with food storage, so much so that consumers around the world – not excluding Greece – use its name when referring to any plastic tapper, with mounting debts and declining sales, has filed for bankruptcy.
The company’s annual sales have been falling for a decade, from $2.7 billion in 2013 to $1.2 billion in 2023. The new CEO it hired last year to turn things around appears to have arrived too late: On Tuesday, Tupperware Brands filed for bankruptcy.
In Greece, the company operated a factory in Thebes since 1967, which closed in 2023.
“No more” towels and paper
Tupperware was founded in 1946 by Earl Tupper, who patented the flexible, airtight seal on plastic containers, an important innovation for keeping food fresh. An invaluable idea when refrigerators were still too expensive for many families.
Betty Crocker’s 1950 Photo Cookbook contained complicated instructions for storing food covered with towels or wax paper, instructions that were time-consuming, didn’t work very well, and left the contents vulnerable.
The candles allowed you to fill your refrigerator and pantry with fresh, unaltered food.
Why?
Whenever an innovation ‘fails’ people start asking ‘why’
Why Kodak kept the film instead of moving towards the digital future?
Why box office success (American DVD, VCR, Blu-ray Disc, video game rental company) stuck with their outdated products, while Netflix “borrowed” her activity and never returned it?
And how did Tupperware allow OXO, Rubbermaid, Ziploc and Snapware to go out of business?
There are many answers. But before we answer them, we must recognize that Tupperware was once an innovative company.
“The King of Great Little Inventions”
“Okay, maybe the rubber tapper wasn’t as revolutionary as the refrigerator or the kitchen – but Most innovations don’t make big leaps. They are small, incremental improvements. which overall result in a much better life. Tupperware is arguably the king of these small and large inventions,” he writes. Megan McArdle of the Washington Post.
An unexplored reservoir
The company was also a pioneer at Tupperware ‘parties’which today seems like a joke, but was a remarkably “new” idea.
This type of direct selling was smart for a new product and took advantage of a huge, untapped labor pool: American housewives.
Friends and neighbors – potential customers – would gather in a house, the company would “recommend” its products and in return would give the hostess some products, or even a job, as a promoter of the “magic” storage items, providing her with a source of income.
In today’s digital world, the face-to-face model is no longer as useful,” said Alison Clark, professor of design history and theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America.
This is a view shared by Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at consultancy GlobalData. Tupperware said it had “failed to keep up with the times” in terms of products and distribution, noting that its direct sales method had “not connected” with young people, who were anyway turning to more environmentally friendly products such as beeswax paper to keep food fresh.
Richard Heyman, another retail analyst, highlighted that the main features of Tupperware products “are easy for other companies to copy”.
Do you change a winning team?
It’s easy, in retrospect, to say that Tupperware should have evolved with the times.
And yes, they should have renewed their product lines sooner.. But it’s dangerous to make conversions when your product is as iconic as the cone.
The hardest thing of all is convincing a company that was once successful that it needs a radical change. Plus, what he’s doing now has worked very well in the past, so obviously… “you don’t change a winning team.”
As with so many things in life, the strategies that made Tupperware successful in the 20th century have also made it difficult for the company to adapt to the 21st century.
For those who grow up sympathetic to the dilemma…
Publisher: Katerina Atsi