Better late than never

TLDR:

I’m a little behind this week.
Turning Tupperware around post-bankruptcy
Tool: You’re Gorgias!

Traveling to BA kicked my A**

This week was a late one since I spent most of the weekend catching up on sleep from 2 red eyes last week traveling down to Buenos Aires. Incredibly beautiful country, amazing food and so many cool things to do.

It was awesome to meet my team there for the first time and go to South America for the first time.

Let’s Save an Iconic American Brand

Tupperware is going to go bankrupt. It’s trading at $0.71/share with $31.5m cap and has $705m in outstanding debt payments that they don’t have the cashflow to repay. From Q4 —> they’ve upgraded from concerned they weren’t going to make their debt payments to saying they won’t be able to.

Quick Reminder that this stock was worth $5B 10 years ago. They do $1B+ in sales a year. This isn’t some dying stock in the waning years of its life, but they have taken some serious missteps and are now going to go through the trials and tribulations of bankruptcy.

Let’s imagine I have a PE fund at my disposal, and acquire it for $35m post-bankruptcy. Here’s how I would turn Tupperware around and get it back on track.

The TLDR: this solid, slightly declining biz that needs to tighten it’s belt and has wayyyyyy too much debt. But let’s set one thing straight. A business doing $1B+/yr in Sales with a 64% Gross Margin % is most brands’ dream. The problem…

They’re SG&A is too high at 56% of Sales and $700m in outstanding debt payments has crushed their cash flow.

Tool that Needs to be on your radar

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Here’s my 5-step plan to restore this brand to glory:

1) Pivot to higher margin higher ownership distribution.

They missed the most obvious boat of the past 20 yrs for a brand to increase sales and reduce costs. Ecommerce. The company’s lack of a DTC presence (Socials. Site experience. Customer storytelling) is astonishing. This seems like a no brainer for a brand that was built on DTC practices 70 years ago.

This company pioneered Tupperware parties. None of us are old enough to experience them, but everyone building a business/in marketing should know about. The fact that they didn’t see how building an eCommerce business with all the benefits of a DTC model is hard to fathom.

The real problem here is that by not prioritizing eCommerce it makes their sales too expensive. Tupperware has 10k employees, which is too dam high for a brand that manufactures and distributes lightweight easy to ship storage units.

It’s crazy that this can still be positioned as an insight, but the boots on the ground direct sales force is too expensive in this economy to effectively run a business through. Scaling those sales through eCommerce + a strategic wholesale strategy will allow the company to maintain a similar level of sales, while greatly reducing costs. Which leads to point #2.

2) Restructure the company.

This is always the toughest piece because this is a number when you ready, but real people’s lives on the other side, but they need to greatly reduce their headcount. The fact that they have a 64% Gross Margin and can’t service their debts + pay their taxes shows how poorly this company is run.

10k employees is too many for this size biz. Yeti which had similar ‘22 numbers with $1B+ at a 48% margin only had <900 employees so it’s possible with a better model. To put this in simpler numbers to understand their efficiency

- Tupperware’s rev per employee: $130k
- Yeti’s was: $1.9m

They need to drive similar sales volumes with exponentially fewer employees and its possible. With a push to DTC + Wholesale they can replace an ineffective Field Sales infrastructure to greatly reduce SG&A. The important thing to keep in mind is that it’s not just the sales reps that make this model expensive. The support staff for all the Sales reps is where the costs really balloon.

3) Liquidate + Sunset 50%+ of the catalog.

Everything about this business screams overextension. Until I researched this company for this I had no idea how many products they sell. They’re in Cookware. Plateware. Cooking Accessories. Drinkware. Oven Mits. Grill Sets.

All of the “spreadsheet smart” categories that someone in the FP&A team put together but no one from Product or Marketing did real customer research into deciding whether it was worth it to invest in these categories.

This isn’t just a Tupperware problem, this is the drug of choice of too many brands over the past couple years who go too hopped up on sales growth without enough thought and research into whether it really made sense to the customers to expand into other categories.

I’ll bet over half of these categories don’t move. Most consumers are probably like me and wouldn’t even consider buying Cookware, Grill sets, or Oven mits from the Food storage company my mom made me use as a kid.

This is a root cause of their demise that too few brands realize until it’s too late. They put good money into the inventory that just sits, restricting how much they can invest in other units (fast movers, marketing, etc).

The capital sits in inventory, but they still need to make the other investments forcing them to take more debt. Additional debt gives them the confident to take more bets and we eventually get here. Sitting on bankruptcy’s doorstep.

Without knowing their product sales I’d say half the product portfolio needs to be liquidated and reinvested into the best sellers. That exercise could be run 2-3x to get to the high value inventory that’s actually profitable and worth scaling.

4) Move to Sustainable products.

This is the big 10+ yr, $5B bet. Tupperware needs to return to its innovative roots and invest in R&D. Just like Tupperware was a generational defining technology that was a core piece of shifting American culture, Tupperware should be leading the charge inventing new materials/tech for people to store their food.

Zillennials won’t buy plastic, and glass isn’t much better for the environment. Losing this demo is what’s killing their business. If they were growing at 18% a year and capturing younger consumers entering their financial prime and becoming heads of households this would be completely different story.

They are currently a poster child for the unsustainable economy. That impact on the planet is now reflected in their bottom line. But that can change.

The food container market is $147.5B. All the major competitors are in a race to the bottom on plastic solutions, and clearly the market has determined it’s not worth being the category leader in that space anymore.

This would require more capital than the $35m acquisition price, but if an acquirer with deep enough pockets put the time and resources into real R&D into what the sustainable version of Tupperware could be that would change the game.

Tupperware could concede the plastics storage market to the current competitors which are already eliminating their profits and create the sustainable storage market and lean into the eco-friendly buying habits that Zillenials demand. They’d be building the future of the category and let the competitors fight over the dying market that is plastics storage.

5) Become the VW for Plastics.

There’s a real opportunity here to reinvent the brand. Out of bankruptcy, Tupperware can play the redemption narrative, similar to VW became a leader in Sustainable car manufacturing after Diesel-gate. Everyone loves a good redemption story.

Bankruptcy can be their “rock bottom” moment. They admit plastic storage is dying and the negative harm it’s caused for the planet and their new mission is to correct their wrongs. They are still going to bring high value protective storages options to consumers, but this time it won’t have a negative impact on the planet.

It won’t happen immediately but during a transition period Tupperware will become a more sustainable business and make the 10-20 year move to sustainable products like they should have started a decade ago.

They can start by:

- Become 1% for the planet member
- Sponsor Ocean Cleanups
- Invest in recycled plastic businesses

The real value behind this positioning is they immediately push competitors to defend plastics or abandon current profits. It’s a terrible lose-lose. Either you completely alienate the short and long term future customers of the product or have to enter the new product innovation space with Tupperware.

In both scenarios it will allow Tupperware to control the narrative and playbook for the category. Giving it the time to disrupt the category it created.


For a company losing $28m/yr with $700m+ in debt barreling for bankruptcy disruption is inevitable. It’s incredibly frustrating to see an iconic American brand get itself into this situation by sticking its head under the sand on 2 very long term trends (eCommerce and Sustainability).

There’s still a lot of value left in this business and I hope that someone who deeply cares about the company and it’s impact on America comes in to turn this thing around.

🧠 The Takeaway

Tupperware is selling for cents on the dollar because it fell behind too many trends and is currently being crushed by debt.

1. eCommerce and Sustainability were the obvious trends it should have been at the forefront of.

2. Don’t overextend your product catalog with too many form factors. It sucks up capital.

👷 What can you do about this?

1. What trends are here to stay that your current and future customers expect? Are you ahead of or behind those trends?

2. Ruthlessly audit your product catalog. Get out of slow movers and dump as much into the quick turners as possible.

3. Don’t take out so much debt that it equals 70% of your annual sales.

As always. Stay confident, connect with your customers, and keep crushing it.

Jeremy Horowitz

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