Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 16, 1993 TAG: 9306160061
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: KISSIMMEE, FLA. LENGTH: Long
Even now, half a century after a Massachusetts inventor named Earl Tupper made the world safe for deviled eggs and rotund lettuces, Tupperware is a vision of perfection. Think of your most incriminating kitchen secrets (fossilized eggplant casserole, anyone?). Now think of Tupperware.
It is the American ideal: of life contained and orderly, where the tuna salad molecules never invade those of the potato salad and there is never any waste. Like cold war America, it is impenetrable by the enemy. It is the take-charge spirit of America sealed with a burp in a plastic box.
But life changes. And as life changes, design changes.
Thus a rainy day weekend in Florida will find the industrial designer Morison Cousins, Earl Tupper's alter ego, in his kitchen, engaged in the passionate art of madeleine-baking. He is thinking not about the legacy of the American icon that he is redesigning but why it is that the last ingredients always cling to those pesky bottom curves of the bowl.
"What often causes you to redesign is the world around you," observed Tupperware's design director, a 59-year-old sophisticated New Yorker prone to using words like "snappy" and "nifty." "We're continuing man's humble tradition of searching for the most perfect form for a bowl," he said.
The world has changed radically around Tupperware, a company perhaps best known for its vintage sales ploy, the Tupperware home party (now transformed into "value for time" classes, among others, run by Tupperware "consultants" instead of hostesses). Although the company's net sales worldwide last year were up 3 percent, to $1.1 billion, sales in the United States have been wilting, down 18 percent last year.
Major gravitational shifts, from a lack of leisure time to women in the work force - as well as zip-lock bags and take-out dinners - have conspired against Tupperware, which is still dependent on its consultants to distribute its tumblers, bacon keepers and other products. Facing competition from more accessible rivals, like Rubbermaid, the company has tried in recent years to take the Tupperware party into the workplace in the form of "work site" parties, to keep its customers less stranded (You can now call a toll-free number, get a catalog and place an order, which is then handled by a consultant.) But the containers themselves, which originally came in frosted crystal and five pastel colors, have had an image problem. They have been perceived, as Cousins put it, as "something for your grandmother."
So, two and a half years ago, the company hired Cousins - heretofore best known for elegantly simplifying household products like the Gillette Pro Max hair dryer and the Dixie cup dispenser - to "contemporize" Tupperware, including such classics as the One Touch Canister.
(Contemporize is not to be confused with Tupperize, another company verb, as in: "Unsightly half-used packages, torn wrappings and spilled contents are a thing of the past, once your kitchen has been Tupperized.")
Working beside Earl Tupper's original lathe in the "Design Depot," as he calls his design team's headquarters, which is not far from the Museum of Historic Food Containers at Tupperware's campus-like headquarters here in central Florida, Cousins is attempting a delicate balance: modernizing and expanding Tupperware without abandoning pie wedges and other aspects of its history.
He compares products to people. "The key is finding what's charming about them," he observed, surrounded by some favorite objects, including pieces of silverware filched from Air France because "there's something nifty about them." Like people, products need the offbeat to give them character. "People who are the most interesting are often neurotic. The ones with good sense almost lose their allure."
The allure of Tupperware is as bountiful as one of Cousins' creations, the voluptuous Thatsa bowl. (As you may have guessed, "There's nothing Thatsa bowl can't handle!")
Indeed, these hallowed halls, where Cousins and a retinue of 10 colleagues are revising classics and trying to invent new ones, seem to whisper "Tupperware, Tupperware." Today, when high technology is taken for granted, it is difficult to imagine the miraculousness of Earl Tupper's original giddy creations, fashioned in what he called "the material of the future."
The dauntless inventor, who died in 1983, was a largely self-taught chemical engineer who worked in a Du Pont chemical plant before World War II. On his own, he began experimenting with polyethylene slag, a black, malodorous waste product of the oil refining business. Determined to make "tomorrow's designs with tomorrow's substances," he found a way to purify the slag into a tasteless, odorless substance and invented an injection molding machine to turn "Poly T" into the seven-ounce Bell tumbler and other perfect remedies for a "thirstquake."
In 1938, he founded the Tupper Plastics Co. His biggest technical innovation was the famous seal, which was modeled after the lid of a paint can and created a partial vacuum. It was the need to teach housewives how to use this brave new material, especially the seal, that gave birth to the Tupperware party.
Like car pools, station wagons and shopping centers, Tupperware helped new homeowners cope with suburban life (according to company research, a new Tupperware party starts somewhere in the world every three seconds). As Bernard Beck, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, points out, Tupperware, along with weekly shopping excursions and monster refrigerators, "gave a whole new rhythm to the things we did."
There was nothing Tupperware couldn't do. It "provided a soupcon of gay informality" to the table, according to early catalogs. It bounced instead of broke. It was "insect-tight and feather-light." It allowed a "fastidious hostess to express a particular air of intimate hospitality in the translucent tones of her Tupperware."
Like Earl Tupper, whom he calls "astonishing," Cousins thinks of designing for the mass market as a sort of accessible cultural fertilizer to make life more gracious (a 1947 edition of House Beautiful called Tupperware "Fine Art for 39 (CT)").
"I was educated at a time when the belief was that wonderful design would make the world a better place," said Cousins, who graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1955 and was awarded the Rome Prize in art history in 1984.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB