October 5 - Earl Tupper

On this day, in 1983, Earl Silas Tupper passed away at his home near San Jose, Costa Rica. If you’ve said his last name out loud, you’ve probably already guessed that Earl is the inventor and founder of the household brand Tupperware. But how did a self-made millionaire from New England end up mountains of Central America? It turns out that Earl was an... interesting guy.

Earl began life in Berlin, New Hampshire on July 28, 1907. The Tupper family lived on a farm there until Earl was three and they left Berlin for the wilds of Central Massachusetts. His father, Ernest, was constantly trying to make a go of the string of farms the family lived on, but lacked the focus and discipline to succeed. His mother, Lulu, was constantly taking in boarders and doing other people’s laundry in order to keep food on the table (an ironic situation to be in when you live on a farm). Out of necessity, Earl became an entrepreneur at an early age. He made a big leap forward in his business acumen when he figured out that he could make more money selling vegetables that someone else had grown rather than those for which he’d spent his own time and energy cultivating.

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After barely graduating from high school (he was a terrible student), Earl took a number of odd jobs, mostly to pay for the correspondence courses he was taking. After taking one in advertising, he became convinced that marketing was the future. When he couldn’t even get his own parents, who were running a greenhouse at the time, to market themselves more aggressively, he became fed up with his father’s lack of ambition and nearly had a break with his family. Hunger kept things from getting too out of hand.

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The only thing Earl could find to admire about his father was their shared love of tinkering. Earl kept a notebook of his ideas and inventions and was always on the lookout for someone to buy one of them. No one ever did. But when the highlights of your musings include a fish powered boat and customized cigarettes, what can you really expect? In order to actually make money, Earl started a landscaping business just in time for the Great Depression to hit. He got married in 1931 and actually got Tupper’s Tree Doctors to limp along for five more years, not having to declare bankruptcy until 1936. Then, amidst constantly increasing unemployment, Earl was lucky enough to get a job in a plastics factory in Leominster, Massachusetts.

For almost a year, Earl worked for the Viscaloid plant, a subsidiary of DuPont. It was heaven on earth for him. The plastics industry in Leominster was mostly a bunch of small shops run by self-taught tinkerers, Earl’s kind of people. He eventually scraped together enough money to buy some second hand molding machines and start his own company. The first products Tupper Plastics made were beads and plastic soap containers.

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Following World War II, DuPont was trying to figure out peace time products could be made with a plastic they’d help develop, polyethylene.  One of the places they sent a block of the stuff to was their former employee’s shop. Unfortunately they’d put a fair amount of fillers into the block and it was difficult to mold anything out of it. Earl convinced his old bosses to send him some pure pellets of the stuff instead. He then spent several months experimenting with them until, in 1946, he finally produced something he called the “Wonderbowl.” Based on the design of paint cans, Earl’s new container had a patented burping seal, was leak proof and resistant to shattering. With such a nifty new invention, Earl did the natural thing anyone would do and began offering it to tobacco companies as a giveaway with their cigarettes.

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Earl’s container design won awards for its inventiveness. He was eventually able to start offering it in department and hardware stores. He even opened a showroom on Fifth Avenue in New York City. None of that was actually helpful in selling Tupperware. Things were not looking good for Earl until he got a look at the sales figures for 1951. He noticed that one woman in Kissimmee, Florida was putting in increasingly larger and more frequent orders. Orders so big they were dwarfing the department store sales. He invited Brownie Wise to company headquarters in Massachusetts to find out why. Brownie’s secret: she sold Tupperware at parties in potential customer’s homes.

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It took about a minute for Earl to see the value in the home party marketing plan and make Brownie the Vice President in charge of sales. She set up headquarters in Florida to manage the growing sales force and Earl remained in Massachusetts, personally overseeing the creation of every new product. It was the kind of partnership that dreams are made of. For a while, at any rate.

As the Tupperware Brand began to take over America’s cupboard space, Earl’s peculiarities grew into eccentricities and eventually toppled over the edge into Lord Cuckoo Land. He had always been something of a perfectionist but he was soon painting his factory floors white so he could see every speck of dirt at a glance. His tolerance for human error, any teeny tiny human error, began to dry up which was unfortunate as he also started to micromanage his workforce to the point they were so nervous about screwing up it became a self-fulfilling spiral. It didn’t help that Brownie was starting to get a lot public credit for the success of the brand, with advocates claiming it was her marketing, and not Earl’s product, that was the winning part of the combination. He strenuously disagreed. On top of the day to day pressures, Earl’s financial advisors were telling him that his children would be paying a ton of taxes if he died as sole owner of the company. They recommended setting up a board to control the company. Not only did Earl refuse to do so, he apparently reached the mental breaking point.

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In 1958, without so much as a how-do-you-do, Earl did several things in rapid succession. First he suddenly fired Brownie, unceremoniously throwing her out of his company. Then he divorced his wife, sold the Tupperware brand to Rexall Drug for $16 million, bought an island, renounced his US citizenship and relocated to Costa Rica. It’s hard to say if he ever recovered. He continued inventing oddities that never made it past the notepad he constantly carried around (the best one: a washing machine/exercise tube designed specifically for traveling salesmen). And at the age of 71, he wrote an essay about how old people should continue to work as an example for the young and, apparently, for space visitors who “would certainly be landing here one day and putting the torch to 75% of us” because of our laziness and worthlessness as breeding stock.

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Tupperware continued to flourish without its founder and its marketing genius. Brownie, who had all but been erased from official company history after being given a mere $30,000 (about a year’s salary) in severance pay, tried to replicate her marketing success with a cosmetics company that used the same party plan to generate sales. It did not go well (which actually vindicated at least one of Earl’s opinions; you obviously couldn’t sell anything using Brownie’s plan) and she died in relative obscurity in the early Nineties. Meanwhile, Rexall consolidated all of the company’s management in Florida and continued to create new products, selling them in new places around the world. 

Today, Tupperware is fairly ubiquitous (except for the right lid for the container you just filled with soup). Sales in just the second quarter of 2019 topped $475 million, which means that maybe Earl shorted his kids quite a bit of money by selling out when he did just to avoid some taxes. Oh, well. His patents on his wares ran out in the mid Eighties, but by then Earl was no longer around to care. He passed away on October 5, 1983 in his adopted country at the age of 76. 

Also on this day, in Disney history: The Maelstrom