The company that time forgot: Lifting the lid on Tupperware’s demise

The most staggering aspect of the demise of the Tupperware company is that the business lasted this long – that nostalgia trumped the multiple disruptive elements that should have crushed this company decades ago.

The Tupperware party is truly over after the company filed for bankruptcy this week, leaving a bunch of bankers and shareholders to deal with the hangover.

It is a case study of a dinosaur business that ignored the ice age a couple of times. But progress has now caught up to the company that time forgot.

Time’s up for Tupperware.

Its beyond-the-odds staying power is a testament to a brand – and a lesson for today’s marketing students about the strength of marque – so longstanding that it has become the generic name for plastic storage containers.

When looking for other brands that have risen to that generic status or even morphed into verbs, we think nothing of Googling for answers online or Hoovering our homes with a vacuum cleaner.

Just about everyone has a piece of the original Tupperware that mums or grandmothers bequeathed at some stage of their downsizing house clean-out. They are probably worth holding on to because there are serious question marks over whether this business will ever be rescued from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Tupperware company only strayed from its direct sales model a few years back – taking shelf space at US Target. It was three decades too late.

The company was created by prolific inventor Earl Tupper in 1946, and while the product was itself revolutionary at the time, it was Tupperware’s distribution model that earned it much of its status. (A history of the company by Alison Clark also contains a list of Tupper’s less successful inventions, including a surgical instrument that facilitated “appendix removal through the anal opening”.)

Tupperware was a pioneer in the use of plastics for home containers, which many were sceptical of at the time.

Tupperware parties were a hybrid of pyramid selling in that recruited salespeople themselves found new recruits. The difference was that they were selling legitimate products.

The charming aspect was that selling and socialisation were combined. The more radical and progressive aspect to the business in the 1950s and ’60s was it allowed many stay-at-home housewives to earn money independently.

I’m sure many grannies can tell stories of living rooms filled with women poring excitedly over plastic containers featuring colourful lids with their tight, spill-proof seals.

However, over the decades, it was this direct selling-distribution method that became Tupperware’s undoing.

Today, even the concept of a housewife feels antiquated, as does the notion of loads of women sitting around in the suburbs wearing frilly aprons.

Now, plastic containers are on the shelves of every general merchandise department store and supermarket, and online.

Bizarrely, the Tupperware company only strayed from its direct-sales model a few years back – taking shelf space at US Target. Arguably it was three decades too late.

The cheaper supermarket plastic storage containers are ubiquitous, and made inexpensively offshore. In a throwback to the old days, Tupperware manufactured in the US until earlier this year, when its North Carolina plant was closed.

The writing has been on the wall for a decade, but alarm bells reached fever pitch last year when the company warned it was running out of cash.

Since then, it has entered into debt-financing deals, including an extended timeline to repay debt. In an even more ominous sign of its dire finances, the company didn’t publish any financial results in 2023.

The only metric not pointing to corporate collapse was Tupperware’s share price when it became a meme stock – like video games retailer GameStop and cinema chain AMC. They all experienced extraordinary share price spikes on the back of social media cult-like campaigns, fuelled by anti-establishment day traders, often motivated by pump and dump plays aimed at hurting short sellers.

The kind of meme stocks that attract attention are typically troubled companies that have been disrupted by technology and whose business models are outdated or broken.

Sadly, Tupperware Brands fits the bill perfectly.

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