NEW YORK — The business behind Tupperware, the plastic kitchenware that changed food storage after World War II and endedupbeing inextricably connected to the celebrations where ladies lookingfor a step of monetary self-reliance and enjoyable in midcentury America offered the vibrant items, hasactually submitted for personalbankruptcy.
Tupperware Brands, the Orlando, Florida-based customer items business that produces the renowned line of containers, stated it was lookingfor Chapter 11 personalbankruptcy defense after havingahardtime to rejuvenate its core service and stoppingworking to safeandsecure a tenable takeover deal.
Despite takingpleasurein the verysame cultural universality as Kleenex, Teflon and other brandnames whose trademarked names are eponymous with whole item classifications, Tupperware has suffered from subsiding sales, increasing competitors and the constraints of the direct-to-consumer marketing design that once specified its success.
The business stated Tuesday in its insolvency filing that customers moving away from direct sales, which make up the huge bulk of its sales more than a quarter-century after the veryfirst Tupperware celebrations, has hit the storied service hard.
The business likewise pointedout growing public health and ecological issues about plastic, internal inadequacies that made it tough to run internationally, and the “challenging microeconomic environment” of the last numerous years for its monetary straits.
Tupperware stated it prepared to continue operating throughout the insolvency procedures and would lookfor court approval for a sale “in order to secure” the brandname.
Tupperware’s roots date to1946 As the business informs it, chemist Earl Tupper discovered motivation while developing molds at a plastics factory. He set out on a objective to develop an airtight cover seal — comparable to the one on a paint can — for a plastic container to aid households conserve cash on food waste.
The brandname skilled explosive development in the mid-20th century, especially with the increase of direct sales through Tupperware celebrations. First held in 1948, the celebrations were promoted as a method for ladies to make additional earnings by selling their goodfriends and next-doorneighbors the lidded bowls for holding leftovers.
The system worked so well that Tupperware ultimately gottenridof its items from shops. It likewise led Tupper to designate Brownie Wise, who came up with the home celebration concept, as a business executive, a position that was unusual for a female at the time.
In the years that followed, the brandname broadened to consistof containers, beakers, cake meals and all way of executes, and endedupbeing a staple in cookingareas throughout America and ultimately, abroad as well. A paper pressreporter who went undercover to work as a footman in Buckingham Palace recorded images of the royal Tupperware on the breakfast table of Queen Elizabeth II.
The story behind the business likewise revealed up on TELEVISION screens and on phase, with representations in PBS’ 2004 movie “Tupperware!” and the play “Sealed for Freshness.”
“For more than 70 years, Tupperware Brands has focused on a core function – to motivate females to cultivate the self-confidence they requirement to improve their lives, nourish their households, and fuel neighborhoods around the world,” Tricia Stitzel, the business’s initially woman CEO, composed as justrecently as2018 “And we continue to make dec