Which is more important: Product or Sales?

The jockey or the horse? The age-old question has plague startups & investors for years. I decided to dig deep into Tupperware, since this is a perfect example.

I don't think there would be many people who haven't heard of Tupperware ..

many of you would also have heard about Earl Tupper, the founder & Inventor..

not too many of you would have heard about Brownie Wise.

She was the sales and marketeer behind the famous “Tupperware parties”.

In the years following World War II, Earl Tupper designed a new kind of plastic (called Poly-T) that was easy to mass-produce in a whole lot of colours and form (through the moulding process). He also patented the double-sealed lid, which made the container air-tight and water-tight too.

This was a game-changer in the plastic industry and was featured as an icon of modern design and describes as featherweight and modern. The biggest reason for this was that plastics weren’t used at home before “Tupperware”.

You’d think with such a category-creator with no competition, would have flown off the shelves. Sorry to disappoint.. but it just sat on retail shelves & gathered dust. Why? Exactly the same reason that made it unique .. plastics weren’t used at home!

It was something that also needed a ‘human’ element to explain the process to make the container air-tight. It was famously called “burping” - one had to lift the seal a bit, “burp” out some air.. and then push it down to seal. Interestingly, this was an ingenious idea which Tupper got from metal lids used on paint cans and patented it.

Now, let's move on to the other protagonist - Brownie Wise.

(Oh.. in my research, I came to know that a movie starring Sandra Bullock is being made on her, so I thought I’d beat them to the punch by a few years :P)

Anyway, back to Wise.. she was 34 years old, working as a secretary & divorced mother of one. One night in 1947, a salesman of Stanley Home Products (mops, cleaners, detergents etc. for housewives) rang her doorbell to deliver his pitch. It was so bad.. that she decided to apply to Stanley! No surprise.. she was hired & she got very quickly promoted to Manager and soon was running the largest branch in Michigan.

The founder of Stanley Home Products, Frank Stanley Beveridge, who was the pioneer of door-to-door selling & popularised “home party selling” became her mentor. They fell apart when Stanley dismissed her “upper management dreams” by saying it’s not for women.

When one of her team members showed her a Tupperware, she identified the need instantly. She mentored her team to start selling this product through “Tupperware parties”. Soon they were outselling major department stores and got exclusive rights to sell in Florida. She even had her own manual educating recruits on Tupperware, the party plan etc. (what we know as SOPs or Standard Operating Processes & which forms the basis of franchises).

Once, there were shipping / supply challenges from Tupperware, and she picked up the phone demanding to talk to Mr. Tupper. He was a stickler for respect & the story would have probably ended there - but probably the sheer numbers she was delivering forced Tupper to ignore her tone. Once this issue was solved, he got her onboard the organisation & named her General Manager of the new Tupperware Home Parties Division, making her one of the rare high-level female corporate executives at the time.

The next year she got promoted to Vice President & the results kept flowing - sales in the second half tripled to that in the first! From 1951-58, she got 10,000 dealers on board and achieved revenues of $10 mn (~$100 mn today) by the end of her tenure! She would lead the group in dramatic party games, like tossing a sealed Tupperware full of grape juice around the room to demonstrate it’s strength; taking utmost care of her dealers & provide regular training to encourage the ladies to dev

elop their demonstration skills.

She even had a weekly newsletter (this is the 1950s!!) for the dealers where they would share their successes and expertise with one another. The other advantage of the newsletter was that she would get feedback from on-the-ground sales folks & could make marketing decisions based on their feedback. Imagine.. this is in the 1950s!

When Tupper hired a PR firm, they agreed that she would be the face & she became the first woman featured on the cover of Business Week!

So she was able to satisfy the two main cravings of the human mind - financial independence and recognition. This to me, personally, is a huge element that most people miss - sellers fail to see what the other person wants… not just in B2C businesses, but also in B2B or building a dealer network, or for that matter, even the team! As she said “You build the people; and they’ll build the business.”

As they say, “Everything that goes up, must come down” - and Wise was a brand by herself, since she really didn’t have too many women contemporaries. She may have been overconfident in handling Tupper; and didn’t make him feel valued enough fo

r his great innovation on the product side. As time went on, she & Tupper would keep banging heads & fought frequently over company strategy and management.

When Tupper was looking to sell the company, he decided that it would be a much more attractive buy, if Tupperware didn’t have an outspoken woman leading sales. Since Wise didn’t have a formal contract, Tupper along with the board of directors fired her in January 1958. She, being as feisty as she was, took them to court & won a one-time payout of a year’s salary; but Tupper went on to sell the company in early 1958.

In conclusion, there's no "OR" if you wish to be successful & remain so. Making a category-creator is a beautiful conjunction of the product along with sales strategy. It’s impossible that one can survive without the other.