Tupperware Moves Its Parties to the Mall

Until Pam Parish attended a Tupperware party last year, she hadn’t been able to find the plastic utensils and food storage products in ages.

Since then, Parish, a 35-year-old teacher’s aide and mother of two, has been rapidly filling her kitchen with containers, bowls and modular mates.

“For a long time you didn’t hear about anybody having a Tupperware party,” she said.

Tupperware has taken Parish’s predicament to heart.

For many, Tupperware demonstrations are a throwback to an earlier generation, when TV’s Donna Reed was the standard-bearer of domestic rectitude.

But the changing customer base of working mothers with limited time, as well as economic turmoil in international markets and a lack of confidence by investors, has resulted in declining sales and a plummeting stock price over the past two years.

So the company that popularized at-home sales demonstrations in the 1940s has gone beyond its decades-old tradition of selling its wares only at Tupperware parties.

Tupperware products are moving into shopping mall kiosks, onto the Internet and into television infomercials to make them more accessible to people who want them but can’t find them.

The products also have been modernized, with bright colors and new features, including characters from Disney movies under a 2-year-old partnership with Disney.

“The company is saying, ‘Look, it’s 1999. We have to figure out how to reach more people. We have to get it in their hands,”’ Lisa Humphreys, a Tupperware sales manager, said after a recent demonstration at the Parish home in Leesburg.

The company began allowing sales representatives to sell Tupperware products at kiosks in several Orlando shopping malls last Christmas and plans to expand to other markets this year.

It also began airing infomercials for the first time last year and promises that customers will be able to buy Tupperware products over the Internet by the end of this year.

Tupperware’s problems, however, run deeper than not being able to get products into potential customers’ hands.

With 85% of its sales coming from outside the United States, Tupperware has been buffeted by the economic crises in Asia and Latin America.

The company, which had $1.08 billion in sales last year, has seen revenue slip by more than 10% during each of the past two years, in part because of currency devaluations and the weakened purchasing power of non-U.S. customers.

Conceding that Tupperware has historically been slow to change, chairman and Chief Executive Rick Goings said the new measures will supplement, not replace, the direct sales made at Tupperware parties by a million-person sales force in more than 100 countries.

“This enhances attendance at our parties. It helps our core direct-selling business,” Goings said at Tupperware’s sprawling, 100-acre headquarters in Kissimmee. “We’ve been fighting stranded customers. There is a pent-up demand for the product.”

Tupperware is coming to the changes with a great deal of reluctance because the company doesn’t want to offend its sales force, said Budd Bugatch, an analyst who follows Tupperware for Raymond James in St. Petersburg.

Tupperware officials don’t want to do anything “that could be perceived or used against them as denigrating or slapping their existing distributorship in the face,” Bugatch said. “But they need a higher level of sales, particularly in the United States.”

Overall sales slipped by almost 12% to $1.08 billion in 1998. Only the U.S., its smallest market, posted a gain (6%) from the previous year. Sales in Asia and Latin America decreased by 24% and sales in Europe decreased by slightly more than 5%.

While the company is still profitable, its income in 1998 dwindled to $69.1 million, a 39% decrease from the previous year.

Investors have also lost confidence in the company since it went public in 1996 as a spin-off of Premark International Inc. Tupperware stock has fallen from a high of $55.50 in December 1996 to a low of about $11 last year. It is currently selling for about $18.

Goings attributed the volatility to the hype surrounding the initial public offering.

Although Tupperware is moving into shopping mall kiosks, don’t expect any full-fledged Tupperware stores any time soon. Over the decades, Bugatch said, the company has learned that its products don’t do well at retailers because it’s pricier than the competition and management believes the products need to be demonstrated.