Brownie Wise

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Brownie Wise (1913–1992) was a legendary saleswoman largely responsible for the success of Tupperware through her development of the "party plan" system of marketing.

A former sales representative for Stanley Home Products, Wise worked with Tupperware inventor Earl Tupper in the early 1950s and insisted that he market his products exclusively through party plans, where women invited friends and neighbors to a combination social event/sales presentation. This method was quite successful, and Wise was presented as a role model to the professional sales force which recruited the party hostesses. Wise invented much of the corporate culture of Tupperware and, by extension, other party-plan marketing organizations. She was especially keen on incentives, one of the chief ones being trips to Florida to the company's sales headquarters for motivational meetings and socializing with other successful representatives. Until this point, sales conventions had generally been almost exclusively all-male affairs; her intent was to make them couples-friendly so as to encourage the husbands of her representatives to enjoy and appreciate their wives' success, or at least not to become so uncomfortable and resentful of it as to force their leaving Tupperware.

Wise was presented to the company's representatives as something of an idealized 1950s woman; some have suggested that she made the organization into a cult of personality for herself. She was presented in the company's literature as representative of all of the good things that the company had to offer and as the source of many of them. This was problematic especially in the context of the male-driven post-World War II, pre-feminist culture of the 1950s. She did her best to maintain good relations with Tupper but the ego clash was inevitable; in 1958 Tupper forced Wise out. As is typical in the aftermath of such things, soon every reference to her was removed from company literature; it was as if she had never existed.

Wise attempted to form her own party-plan cosmetics company, Cinderella, but was unsuccessful; after this she largely faded from view and died in relative obscurity in 1992. Soon after he parted ways with Wise, Tupper sold the Tupperware organization to Dart Industries for US$16 million.