The Fall of Tupperware

There is a sound three generations of households recognise instantly. A soft puff of air - the Tupperware lid sealing shut. That sound built a $2.67 billion global empire. It also built the conditions for its collapse.

The Fall of Tupperware is not a story about a bad product. The product was extraordinary. Containers made forty years ago still seal perfectly today. The engineering never failed.

Everything else did.

This Tupperware business case study book traces how one of the twentieth century's most remarkable commercial innovations - a product that redefined domestic food storage and created an entirely new model of selling - destroyed itself through a specific, instructive sequence of decisions.

Earl Tupper converted industrial waste into something beautiful. Brownie Wise turned a living room into a sales revolution. Together they built something the world had never seen. The question this book asks is how the organisation that inherited that achievement managed to waste it so completely.

The lid still burps. The business is bankrupt. This book explains the reasons.