It's surprising that few plastics processing companies are really well-known household names.
Considering their size and importance to the economy and to the communities where they do business, plastics companies usually have a pretty low profile.
The housewares market has always been an exception. Branding is important for housewares molders, and some of the leading companies have been around for decades. But it's a tough market for a company to see sustained success. Innovation is critically important, but so is cost. We've seen some high-profile cases over the years where a housewares molder tried unsuccessfully to raise its prices — usually because of rising resin costs — and their retail customers said nope and gave their valuable shelf space to a competitor instead.
Tupperware was always a special case. The company had the cool history, with Earl Tupper, Brownie Wise and the Tupperware party sales system. Go to any garage sale today and you'll immediately recognize the cool designs and colors. You're likely to point and say something like, "My Aunt Dorothy had a Cake Taker just like that."
You might think of Tupperware as an artifact from the 1960s, but the company had quite a number of success stories more recently, too. That includes many design and technology awards, as recently as this year, and a collaboration with NASA to put a Tupperware-designed plant growing system on board the International Space Station.
But lately, Tupperware is in survival mode. Consumer tastes change. And multilevel marketing isn't something special anymore.
Tupperware's biggest problem is probably the economy and high inflation, which makes it hard for young consumers to buy homes and stock them with premium housewares.
Tupperware's been changing its strategy to deal with all of these challenges, and the latest move really hurts: closing its Hemingway, S.C., factory, which was its only U.S. manufacturing plant.
When competitor Rubbermaid closed its massive Wooster, Ohio, molding plant in 2003, it was quite a blow to the community, but it was not crippling. Wooster was doing better than a lot of other small to midsized Ohio communities.
Hemingway, on the other hand, has fewer than 500 residents, so the company has been critical to the local economy for 48 years. Tupperware opened the 1.1 million-square-foot Hemingway factory in April 1976. Now layoffs will start for the plant's remaining 148 employees at the end of September and wrap up early next year.
This isn't the end of Tupperware; the company is still hanging on, and I'm sure the brand will outlive us all. But it's the end of a sad chapter in Tupperware's history. And it's a pity that this is happening an era when low-cost resin and advanced automation should be making U.S. plastics manufacturing more globally competitive.
Don Loepp is the editor of Plastics News and author of the Plastics Blog.