A cohort of immaculately made-up housewives sit around a wallpapered parlour as a Tupperware container of grape juice is thrown across the room.
It's a strange image, but it's just one example of the many demonstrations that took place in American living rooms and patios throughout the 1950s and '60s. Later, an in-house Tupperware seller would take orders for the new plastic storage containers that seemed miraculously water-tight.
These days, Tupperware parties look a little different.
A lot of the networking now happens on social media, often in dedicated Facebook groups. Glossy photoshops of special deals sourced from a library of promotional images maintained by the company are posted to walls accompanied by emoji-filled captions.
And rather than order slips, sellers these days have a unique URL that earns them a small commission every time someone uses it to make a purchase.
But even after the digital revolution, in-person Tupperware parties are still being held, hosted by a new league of plastic ambassadors who hawk the kitchenware as a means of making a little cash on the side.
Perhaps not for long. Sales and profits of Tupperware Brands have fallen steadily in recent years, and earlier this week, shares dropped by nearly 50 per cent after the company announced it was seeking financing to help "remediate its doubts regarding its ability to continue as a going concern".
Tupperware Brands said it was considering selling property assets, amid "substantial doubt about its ability to continue".
In a Facebook group where aficionados gather to share their memories of Tupperware parties and photos of long-discontinued modular cereal containers and mustard dispensers, the news did not go down well.
Commenters — many current and former Tupperware salespeople — expressed everything from dismay, to denial, and vows to sell more than ever before in the hopes of keeping their beloved brand afloat.
There were calls to embrace the "Tupper spirit", and for the sales force to "get up, go out, and Tupper, Tupper, Tupper".
It begs the question: How did what are essentially plastic food storage containers cultivate such a passionate and invested following that it remains 77 years after the brand's inception?
The answer, it seems, likely has little to do with actual Tupperware.
Tupperware's inventor and his unlikely sidekick
Tupperware was created in 1947, after inventor Earl Silas Tupper developed a new form of polyethylene plastic that was easy to mould and mass produce.
His first product was the "Wonder Bowl", which was praised for its sleek, modern design. The brand was quickly stocked in department stores.
"Many products like Tupperware had real novelty. They were unlike anything that had been seen before," wrote American cultural Historian Jeffrey Meikle.
But there was a problem.
The secret to Tupperware's ability to keep food fresh for longer — or in the words of the 1980s jingle, to keep "meat meatier", "chips chipier" and "jam jamier" — was its so-called "burping" seal.
To ensure the container was properly airtight, users had to lock the lid into place before pushing on the centre and popping open a small section of the lid to let out excess air. Housewives, accustomed to glass jars and ceramic containers, at first couldn't figure out how it worked.
That's until Brownie Wise, a divorced single mother from Florida, had an idea. Inspired by companies like Stanley Home Products, which relied on home sellers to demonstrate new cleaning products, Wise started her own Tupperware resale business called Patio Parties in the late 40s.
Capitalising on housewives' vast social networks, Wise recruited women to act as dealers who would help other women host at-home selling parties. The idea was simple: the host would invite her friends, family and neighbours over for refreshments, and the dealer would demonstrate how to use the seal.
At the end, guests would make their purchases and the party host would be rewarded with a thank-you gift and a small commission on what was sold.
"The congenial atmosphere of a Patio Party is relaxing. All the guests are imbued with the group spirit of the party. The social spirit of a party tends to lower sales resistance of those present, as well as increase a competitive buying spirit," Wise wrote in the plan she produced for dealers, according to Bob Kealing's book, Life of the Party.
"The buying spirit is contagious; it is a proven fact that you will sell more to a group of 15 women AS A GROUP than you will sell to them individually. This is the essence of the Patio Party Plan."
Wise saw games and prizes as essential to creating the party spirit. Her plan included the advice:
"A successful party always includes entertainment in the form of games, with prizes and favours. Please make good use of the game book, with which your manager will supply you … When circumstances do not permit the playing of games, prizes should still be awarded, and they can be given for a lucky numbered card, the oldest or youngest person, the newlywed, or the mother of the most children, etc."
The strategy was a success and by 1951 Tupper had hired Wise as his vice president of marketing — an unprecedented position for a woman.
The Tupperware sisterhood
According to some experts, Wise's rise to the top of the company was only the first of many opportunities afforded to women through the new home-selling model.
"Many women were socially isolated, and they used the Tupperware system to become part of a sisterhood selling products to other women using expanding social networks," says Alison J. Clarke, a professor of design history and theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and author of a book on Tupperware's history.
"These were women who wouldn't have had access to radical politics or middle-class opportunities; many of them hadn't graduated from high school but they ended up setting up their own businesses, and even kind of doing public speaking — nobody had ever given them access to these types of forums before."
As part of her research, Clarke travelled around America interviewing Tupperware ladies, as they were known, from the '50s. She found not only were they far more diverse than the retro ads featuring white women and nuclear families would suggest, but that their memories were largely of a horizontal corporate culture centred around women supporting women.
As an example, she points to a group of Guatemalan women living in the US who were able to put their children through college in the 1960s with their Tupperware earnings. Their loyalty to the brand was so fierce that they spent their time embroidering textiles for each other with Tupperware motifs.
"Products never succeed just because they're functional," Clarke says, "it's always about how culturally and socially embedded they are".
Wise seemed to know this inherently. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, she ran a weekly newsletter for dealers encouraging them to share their success with one another and spruiking tips for positive thinking. For many, Tupperware-selling became more than a job — it was a lifestyle.
Alongside the networks being developed around the punch bowl, at a higher level, women were also encouraged to partake in glamorous — and sometimes bizarre — corporate rituals designed to reinforce and reward brand loyalty.
The company hosted elaborate jubilees, where sellers were awarded with certificates, badges, and prizes. Some of the top performers were given cars, mink coats, furniture and diamond rings.
"It was stuff that women only saw in Hollywood, and suddenly they came from a little place in Missouri, and they were on a stage being awarded these fabulous gifts," Clarke says.
"These to me were women who had become invisible, and here was a company that made them visible … lots of women actually didn't aspire to live in domestic drudgery, and their whole life to be about preparing meals for small children, but what this did was completely valorise that."
Ironically the woman behind it all would eventually be left with nothing. Tupper and Wise's relationship was rocky, and by 1958 she was fired and all evidence of her contributions erased from the brand's public image for decades. The company was sold the same year.
The rise of plastics, and fall of Tupperware
Despite Tupper and Wise's acrimonious parting, the home-selling model they had built lived on, even as women gained greater opportunities in the workplace.
The first Australian Tupperware party is believed to have been hosted by Melburnian Mary Paton in 1961.
The product is now distributed throughout the world (though it pulled out of New Zealand in 2022, citing a decline in sales caused by COVID).
"Tupperware did really well when it went global in countries that had women with intact social networks, like in India," Clarke says. "In South America and China, it was doing really well until COVID."
Tupperware's early success is evidenced by its evolution into a noun used to refer to any plastic container. While most Australians have a Tupperware cupboard or drawer, many don't actually own any Tupperware.
"It's become a victim of its own success, because everybody thinks that a plastic pot is Tupperware, even if it's not Tupperware," Clarke says. "But there's also this kind of mysterious cult around it, I don't think it's transparent, and I don't think it's successfully appealed to a younger generation."
Another part of its downfall, she says, has been the explosion of disposable plastics. Not only has the environmental impacts of this shift resulted in many turning away from the material altogether, but it's also no longer seen as a luxury product.
"It's about the history of plastic, and how does a really expensive plastic product compare with disposability?" Clarke says.
For decades Tupperware came with a lifetime warranty, and it was common to buy it with the expectation that it would eventually be handed down to your children.
But now, with our lives awash with plastic, many question why they should spend more money on a legacy brand when the supermarket equivalent appears to achieve similar results for half the cost.
Of course, the brand's die-hard fans don't agree and resell markets have emerged for collectors to buy and sell hard-to-find original Tupperware. Ironically, the product's much-touted longevity may have actually played a role in diminishing sales.
"They were marketed to be things that you handed down ... and I think they've tried to stick with that, but at the end of the day, it's plastic," Clarke says.
"If it goes completely bust, what will happen to those to those women who were in those Tupperware networks?"
