Charles Henry was young finance graduate with audit roles in the early 1980’s with PriceWaterhouse. He chose to try another role for a couple of years.  This was with the Tupperware organisation.  Come 30+ years later he retires from that group after a long term career with numerous postings outside of Australia. 
 
It’s fortunate that his links to HRC member and MC Bill Troedel  caused to him to get onto our speaker list and provide the club with a most interesting story of the evolution of the Tupperware business.   Fascinating but little known to the lunch time audience he told of WWII American businessman inventor Earl Elias Tupper and post WWII housewife “Brownie” Wise and how they came together in business.
 
It’s the stuff of movies, particularly the role of Brownie Wise the woman who approached Tupper in 1948.  She made a lengthy phone call to his office in Massachusetts, during which she explained her extraordinary success selling Tupperware via home parties.
 
 Employed thereafter in a senior capacity she marketed Tupper’s products in the early 1950’s all with the house party concept.  They were withdrawn from retail stores.   It tapped into, at the time the unemployed, latent work force of house wives.   Tupper’s own earlier attempts to sell via conventional retail outlets had failed.   A forthcoming movie seeks to cast Sandra Bullock as Wise! 
 
Wise was sacked from the company in the late 1950’s.   At the same time Tupper sold out to Rexall another company and ultimately retired to Costa Rica establishing a significant philanthropic reputation.  To this day there have been several ownership changes at the corporate level but the product and marketing concepts retained.
 
Charles explained how the marketing model has transgressed the world.    Today the company is very strong but especially so in emerging countries more so than developed ones.  Doubtless the greater opportunity to harness a ready supply of under employed women in those developing countries at “house parties” is part reason.
 
The product’s genesis goes back to how Tupper used black, inflexible pieces of polyethylene slag, a waste product of the oil refining process given to him by his supervisor at DuPont.  He purified the slag and moulded it to create lightweight, non-breakable containers, cups, bowls, plates, and even gas marks that were used in World War II. He later designed liquid-proof, airtight lids, inspired by the secure seal of paint can lids.   Cleverly Tupper established world wide patents in 1949.