Brownie Wise - Tupperware's First Lady

Brownie Wise, born in 1913, grew up in a broken home in rural Georgia. Her mother, a traveling Union organizer, often left her with cousins for long stretches of time. In 1936, she met and married Robert Wise. Robert took a job with Ford Motor Company and the couple relocated to Detroit. Their son, Jerry, was born in 1938. Although Brownie wrote pieces for a Detroit newspaper column about her idealic life, it was fiction. Robert was a violent alcoholic and they were divorced in 1942.

Earl Tupper was constantly inventing things, but after working in a plastics factory, he decided that he could go into business for himself and invented the Tupperware seal that has made the product so successful. Tupperware was a successful product being sold at home parties and in department stores when Brownie Wise began to sell it in the late 1940s.

After the divorce, Brownie took classes and became a secretary, but she also sold Stanley Home products in home parties to make extra money. Sixteen year old Gary McDonald was also a successful Stanley Home party seller and suggested to Brownie that they start a business selling Tupperware at home parties, which they did. Soon they were so successful that they caught the attention of Earl Tupper. Brownie convinced Tupper that he should sell his products only at home parties. So Earl pulled his product out of the department stores and hired Brownie, eventually making her Vice-president of Sales.

Brownie built up the home party business, establishing headquarters in Kissimee Florida, holding jubilee celebrations, and traveling extensively across the country. She was so successful that in 1954, she became the first woman to be featured on the cover of Business Week magazine.

But Brownie wasn’t a feminist pioneer. Although Tupperware was largely a women’s business, Brownie surrounded herself with male executives. Women could be dealers and managers, but distributorships were offered to husband and wife couples where the husband was expected to quit his job and handle the distribution aspect of the business. Regional positions were the exclusive provenance of men.

In 1957, trouble began to brew between Earl Tupper and Brownie. He began to question some of her expenses, but she consistently refused to go to Rhode Island with her books for Earl to examine. Finally, Earl went to Florida and the end result was Brownie being fired.

Even though she tried to start a new company, Brownie never again had the same success she experienced with Tupperware. She pioneered methods and strategies that are used by many other companies even today. Earl Tupper sold the company and it continued to expand. Tupperware is sold today in over 100 countries.