Tupperware parties continue today: This is the story of Brownie Wise and her revolutionary sales innovation

It was back in the United States in the 1950s when single mother Brownie Wise came up with an idea that would revolutionise the modern world of food.

She would turn a simple invention into a social craze: her concept caused social gatherings to spring up across the country and then the world, before reinventing a brand that lives until this day.

In 1946, Earl Tupper created airtight containers from plastic waste, but the product was not a huge success.

During this time, the BBC writes that Brownie was working demonstrating mops and cleaning products for a company called Stanley Home Products.

‘Management is no place for a woman’

Bob Kealing, author of Life of the Party, told the BBC’s Witness History that “the head of Stanley basically threw cold water on her ambition to be a manager [with] words to the effect of: ‘Honey, management’s no place for a woman‘.”

Wise, inspired to prove Kealing wrong, started hosting parties to sell Tupperware she’d bought. Her idea caught on like wildfire, and by 1949, “she was outselling the department stores in her home city of Detroit and had 19 demonstrators working for her.”

The BBC World Service explain her trick in the following way: “Her party trick was to fill a ‘wonderbowl’ - Tupperware’s flagship product - with grape juice, seal it up very tight and then hurl it across the room.

“People would be aghast. But it would fall and it would tumble across the floor and not a drop would would spill”, Bob adds on his podcast.

People quickly wanted to host their own parties and, now general sales manager of the new Tupperware Home Parties Inc after amazingly managing to convince Mr Tupper over the phone she could do the job, Wise was selling huge numbers of products.

By 1954, she ran a network of 20,000 sellers hosting Tupperware parties.

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In the end, her success was her downfall, as the owner of the Tupperware brand was unhappy that all the brand’s public-facing success was down to Brownie. In 1958 he fired her, and Brownie never managed to repeat the success she’d managed before.

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