The Tupperware Queen

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

July 2, 1957. At the annual Tupperware jubilee in Florida, company VP Brownie Wise is admiring her handiwork. 1,200 people have convened on her private island for a luau—complete with live lobsters, orchid leis and prizes for Tupperware’s top sellers. Most of the people here owe their job to her. That's because Brownie perfected a sales strategy that has made the innovative plastic product famous. Not to mention a cash cow. She's famous, too: Fortune and CBS News have hailed her as a savvy corporate leader. But tonight, at this fabulous celebration of the company's glittering success, storm clouds are gathering. How did a single mom from Michigan turn a simple household product into a juggernaut? And how did all go wrong?

Special thanks to our guests: Alison Clarke, design history professor at University of Applied Arts - Vienna and author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America; and Bob Kealing, author of Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:05.4	History this week, July 2nd, 1957.
0:11.3	I'm Sally Helm.
0:15.2	There are 800 live lobsters on this high foot island
0:19.7	on a lake in Florida.
0:22.2	Also about 800 baked chickens, 800 fresh pineapples,
0:27.4	2000 years of corn, and arriving on a fleet of boats
0:32.0	from the mainland, more than 1,000 people.
0:35.4	All of them associated in somewhere another
0:38.0	with a household product that you have almost certainly heard of.
0:42.4	Tupperware.
0:44.4	The leader of them all is a woman named Brownie Wise.
0:49.2	This private island, it is her private island.
0:52.8	She's brought all of these people here for a lieu out
0:56.2	as part of the fourth annual Tupperware Jubilee.
1:00.8	Brownie has revolutionized Tupperware sales.
1:04.4	She is a genius at selling these airtight plastic containers.
1:09.4	And in the process, she has made a lot of people a lot of money
1:13.6	and she's risen very high within the company.
1:17.2	Maybe not quite as high as the founder, Earl Tupper,
1:20.4	but she's definitely getting close.
1:22.6	And in the eyes of the public at least,
	...

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