Tupperware Consultant App
Services
Mobile App Design · UX Research · Prototyping
Employer
Buuuk (Client: Tupperware)
Tupperware’s sales force isn’t a team, it’s an army - 250,000 sales people in Indonesia alone, generating over $200M in a single year, with more than nine-tenths of turnover coming from outside the US. In 2017, working with Buuuk, we designed the mobile app that became that army’s single operating platform across India, China, and Japan - one tool that did the product thinking, the pricing math, and the selling for them, instead of asking them to carry it all in their heads.
Tupperware’s products are the kind that get handed down through family generations, but the business selling them runs on a sales force so vast it had outgrown the tools supporting it. In Indonesia alone, 250,000 salespeople generated over $200 million in 2014, and most of Tupperware’s revenue comes from outside the US. In India, China and Japan, those salespeople were still selling from paper catalogues. Every inventory change meant reprinting and redistributing, remote teams were hard to reach, and a printed page could show a product but never its value.
The brief was a single platform for the sales teams in India, China and Japan, replacing paper with something always current. Bundles were the real test. Cost saving combinations came in so many configurations that salespeople struggled to remember them, let alone price them by hand in front of a customer.
The deeper challenge was designing for range. Internet access was unreliable, many people used older iPhone and Android devices, and comfort with technology varied widely. The same tool had to feel effortless on day one for everyone.
We started with the hardest problem first: could the app do the thinking, instead of the salesperson? Rather than a static catalogue to search and calculate from, Smart Kitchen suggested bundles and discounts based on what a customer actually needed, and worked out the price automatically when the order was placed. Pictures and prices updated in real time, and salespeople could place orders and check inventory and shipping in the same place. Two weeks after kickoff, we had a working prototype that already accounted for the promotional mechanics Tupperware ran across markets.
Because the conditions were as important as the features, we built for them. The app works offline and syncs when a connection returns, runs on older devices, and keeps its interface simple enough for a workforce of every skill level.
We built a product stacker animation that lets a salesperson show, live, how a chosen set of products would sit on the customer’s own shelves, turning an abstract pitch into something a customer could picture in their kitchen before they’d bought anything.
We took the visual pitch one step further with a social proof feature. Salespeople could share a before and after of a customer’s kitchen, in an Instagram style grid, straight from the app to their own social networks, turning every satisfied customer into evidence for the next sale.
Along the way, the research behind these decisions surfaced something we hadn’t set out to find: rich, usable data on individual sales performance. Rather than let it go to waste, we built a sales dashboard so salespeople could follow their sales, their goals and the new recruits they brought in.
We kept the whole project moving with weekly sessions with the development team, face to face updates with Tupperware to hold a tight timeline, and end to end testing before launch.
The app didn’t just launch. It became the primary sales platform for Tupperware’s teams across India, China and Japan, adopted as the default way those sales forces work day to day.
Reprinting stopped being a bottleneck. The suggestion engine put the right products and pricing in front of a customer without the salesperson having to carry it all in their head, and the product stacker and social proof features gave less experienced salespeople a way to sell as persuasively as a veteran.
Designed for scale from the outset, the app was built to grow with a sales force that was only going to get larger, and its simplicity meant its usefulness didn’t stop at the most tech comfortable reps. For a sales force hundreds of thousands strong, that is the kind of decision that carries an organisation at genuinely massive scale.
250,000 strong sales force in Indonesia, the market the platform was built to serve
3 countries (India, China and Japan) using it as their main sales platform
2 weeks from kickoff to working prototype