Business

Life of the Party: How the Remarkable Brownie Wise Built and Lost a Tupperware Party Empire by Bob Kealing

by Rachel Fuller •

September 2016, no. 384

Affirm Press $24.99 pb, 318 pp, 9781925344967

Business

Life of the Party: How the Remarkable Brownie Wise Built and Lost a Tupperware Party Empire by Bob Kealing

by Rachel Fuller •

September 2016, no. 384

The foundation years of the Tupperware empire have all the elements of a great story. Earl Tupper, an introverted inventor determined to become a millionaire by the age of thirty, created the Tupperware range from a plastics waste product that was deemed unusable in postwar America. Sales were elusive until Brownie Wise, a poorly educated single mother, introduced Tupperware to the neighbourhoods, mobilised the masses, and formalised the highly successful, home-based selling technique, the Tupperware party.

Rachel Fuller

By this contributor

Rachel Fuller is a Sydney-based bookseller and writer. She has been a contributing writer on culture, books, and the arts for publications such as The Saturday Newspaper, Art & Australia, The Collective, ArtistProfile, ABCArts, and Ocula. In 2007 she graduated with honours from The University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, and was a co-director of Sydney artist-run initiative Locksmith Project Space and co-founder and co-editor of arts journal Locksmith Project. She graduated in 2014 from the University of Technology, Sydney with a MA in Non-Fiction Writing.