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There is no comparison with my previous job or the market stall. At the first meeting I earned 38,000 liras. The demonstrations were like parties! We would pass around coffee, chat and some people would bring cakes. We enjoyed ourselves a couple of hours and in the end I got paid. Wow! Two weeks later I fixed six parties in six days: 1,260,000 liras. I still have the diary where I wrote down the sums I made. I was so excited that I even got everyone around me to be enthusiastic. Without realizing it, I had already created a group. Nerina, the Distributor at the time, immediately asked me to be unit manager. She advised me, helped me and listened to me. She was very influential. Even now that I have my own Distributorship and she’s retired, I can still hear her guidance. Most importantly, I wanted to succeed in this business and achieve milestones. “What do I have to do to get a car?” I would ask, and so on. At first, I would have to host a party whenever someone in the family could lend me their car. When I got my own car, everything changed. In most jobs, I am told no one tells you you’re really great at the work! At Tupperware, they do. People would always ask me, “What are you doing now?” because I kept changing jobs for such a long time. When I answered Tupperware, they’d look at me astonished! Even my husband at first failed to understand my work. I did not have a regular income and he never knew where I was going. I was always out at parties or meetings, even at night. It was very difficult at first to make him understand my work and to be supportive. But I believed in this work, and I did all I could to get him to come on vacation when I finally got the opportunity. When I finally managed it, we traveled to Rome together. He then began to realize what working for Tupperware meant to me. Now, he is one hundred percent involved. We have been everywhere – Dubai, Las Vegas, Florida and so many more amazing places.
In these difficult economic times, my advice to everyone is: try it! You can become a role model the way I have for a lot of people, including my family. I even helped train my niece. She was about to go to college, so I told her, “Claudia, have a try.” Now she’s a Distributor. Then my sister, who came to work in the warehouse for me, and my brother-in-law, who lost his job and I am now going to hire. Even my kids are helping me out! You don’t have to clock in on this job and I’ve helped a lot of people find work ever since I became a Distributor in 2001. It’s like being an employment agency; my husband, who was so skeptical, decided in 2004 to leave his job to help me run the distributorship. I was renting an office in 2001 and then decided to buy new premises at Rivoli and take out a mortgage. The new Distributorship is in a condo, taking up one whole floor covering 520 square meters and it has a warehouse, offices, coffee corner, a big showroom with a stage, the unit managers’ room, a dining kitchen communicating with the stage for training sessions, and wash rooms. My husband recently, when I was in Ibiza, gave me a surprise by repainting the walls magenta and gray in classic Tupperware style. Then there’s a room where my kids have created their own corner with a computer and TV set. At their age I’d never see them otherwise, but like this we always lunch together. And now I’m thinking of moving to new premises that would be even bigger and better. I know I can do it. I had to apply to a lot of banks before I got a mortgage, and eventually I succeeded. The market is people just like me, the people we galvanize into doing things. Sometimes I have to make an effort and remind myself that I can do it; it’s not always easy. But never let the problems get you down. This work has clearly revolutionized my life. I was able to create all of this and rise to the top with the help of my family and all of the women who work here. Anyone who is alone and joins this company will find that she is a member of a big family, in a very special world. And she will have a life that will be exciting and continuously changing.