Boom to bust: Kodak to BlackBerry, 5 top brands that went out of business

Tupperware, the maker of plastic food storage containers used in kitchens around the world, has filed for bankruptcy amid shrinking demand and mounting financial losses.

Named after Earl Tupper, a chemist who first created plastic containers to store leftover food using chemical residue at an oil refining factory, Tupperware shot to fame in the United States during the 1940s when war-weary families grew mindful of food waste to save money.

The company continued to grow for decades and expanded beyond the United States to become a household brand worldwide.

The company’s popularity was partly a result of its non-traditional marketing strategy, which brought women as independent sales representatives who would hold “Tupperware parties” at their homes to sell food storage containers.

With the strategy becoming less effective in recent decades, Tupperware tried to reach new customers through online channels and placements in brick-and-mortar stores, which resulted in limited success.

News agency Reuters reported that Tupperware had been trying to turn its business around for many years after reporting successive quarters of falling sales. But a post-pandemic jump in the costs of labour, freight and raw materials like plastic resin kept its business under pressure.

As a result, Tupperware’s estimated liabilities increased up to $10 billion versus its assets of only $1 billion, according to bankruptcy filings.

Declaring bankruptcy allows a company to get rid of its past debt that it is unable to pay while banks and other lenders receive only a part of the due amount.

Here’s a quick look at five household brands with global appeal and name recognition that either went bankrupt or transitioned into a new line of business under financial pressure.

Kodak

Even though it invented the technology for digital photography, Kodak failed to keep up with the digital revolution it helped unleash.

Its rivals like Sony, Canon and Nikon diversified their offerings to stay on top of the digital revolution in photography. But Kodak stagnated, committing what’s been described as one of the biggest corporate blunders.

According to Steve Sasson, a Kodak engineer who came up with the ultimate replacement of analogue or film photography, the company’s response to his invention of lacklustre.

“My prototype was big as a toaster… it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute but don’t tell anyone about it’,” he told The New York Times.

Founded in 1880, the company created the market for camera film and then dominated it for well over a century, before declaring bankruptcy in 2012 to shed part of its debt and pension obligations.

The company still exists but only as a shadow of its former self. It now sells computer-to-plate imaging and industrial film and chemical services among other related products.

Toys ‘R’ Us

Founded in 1957, American retailer Toys ‘R’ Us existed for decades as one of the world’s largest toy store chains with presence across the United States, Canada, Asia and Australia.

But the piling debt to the tune of $5 billion forced the toy seller to file for bankruptcy in 2017. It closed down the last of its 735 US stores by June 2018.

Planning a comeback, Toys ‘R’ Us is opening two dozen new stores across the United States under a new group of owners who acquired a majority shareholding in 2021.

Orkut

The popularity of social media platform Orkut rivalled that of Facebook in the second half of the 2000s.

Set up in 2004 by Orkut Buyukkokten, a Turkish engineer working for Google at the time, Orkut hit a peak in 2009 with 300 million users.

But it lost the initial momentum as its parent company, Google, failed to see the potential in social media platforms that had yet to take the world by storm.

Google’s focus at the time was on online advertisements and search technologies, which meant it didn’t see Orkut as a “priority”, Buyukkokten told TRT World in an earlier interview.

Orkut’s status as a go-to social media platform—at least in markets like Brazil, India and Pakistan—diminished over the years as Facebook and Twitter gained massive popularity. Google pulled the plug on Orkut in 2014.

Buyukkokten is planning a comeback with what technology website WIRED calls “Orkut’s second coming”.

Toshiba

Even though Toshiba never declared bankruptcy, the Japanese electronics giant has consistently made headlines for all the wrong reasons since 2015.

People were taken aback when serious accounting malpractices across multiple divisions of Toshiba—which makes, or once made, nearly every electronic item from TV sets and computers to battery cells and speaker systems—came to light.

The company had been overstating its profits for years to inflate its share price. Investigators unearthed another set of accounting irregularities in 2020 while a separate investigation in 2021 revealed it colluded with Japan’s trade ministry to suppress the interests of foreign investors.

The series of controversies culminated in a consortium of investors pooling money to take the company private last year, ending its 74-year run as a publicly traded business.

“It's not clear how the new owners plan to turn around Toshiba,” said a BBC report, adding that high-margin digital services are likely to be a focus of Toshiba going forward.

BlackBerry

Founded in 1984, BlackBerry became a pioneer in the field of phone technology.

Owning a BlackBerry was a status symbol. Barack Obama, then president-elect of the United States, was described as somebody whose thumbs were “practically welded to his BlackBerry”.

Its mini-Qwerty keyboard let one type with both thumbs, which meant the ability to send and receive emails without going through the trouble of turning on a computer.

But everything changed as soon as smartphone maker Apple launched the much sleeker iPhone with a touchscreen in 2007.

Even though it didn’t declare bankruptcy, BlackBerry never caught up with the touchscreen smartphone revolution.

One of BlackBerry's unique selling propositions was its emphasis on security. But its appeal among corporate clients didn’t translate well to the broader consumer market, which became increasingly dominated by Apple and Android phones.

In 2016, it stopped manufacturing its own smartphones. It licensed its brand to third-party manufacturers, which briefly made BlackBerry-branded Android phones but failed to gain traction.

BlackBerry now operates mainly as a software company, focusing on cybersecurity and enterprise solutions.

Meanwhile, Nokia's failure to sustain its position as a market leader in the mobile phone segment isn’t too different from that of BlackBerry.

Nokia relied on its Symbian operating system but failed to optimise it for touchscreen smartphones and app ecosystems in the post-2007 era dominated by touchscreen devices backed by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

In an attempt to compete against Apple and Google, Nokia partnered in 2011 with Microsoft to adopt the Windows Phone operating system. However, the initiative failed and the company’s sales continued to plummet.

Yet Microsoft acquired in 2014 Nokia’s mobile phone business for $7.2 billion in an attempt to integrate Nokia's hardware with its Windows Phone software. The move proved largely unsuccessful, and Microsoft wrote off the deal just two years later.

By 2016, Microsoft exited the mobile phone business, effectively marking the end of Nokia as a major player in the smartphone market.

Nokia shifted its focus to telecommunications infrastructure afterwards and is no longer in the handset business.