Part IThe Story
A Voice from Ada
"Well, this is Rich DeVos in Ada, Michigan, coming forth once again to chat a little bit with you."
The cassette is catalogued as Amway Cassette Series VA-2160, and it was recorded in January 1983 for a specific audience: the company's Direct Distributors, the people the plan called the heads of their organizations. The voice belongs to a man of fifty-six who had spent most of the previous quarter century talking for a living. Talking was the job. He talked in hotel ballrooms and convention halls, on LP records and on the tapes his distributors sold one another by the hundreds of thousands. This tape was different. He did not open with a story about his grandfather's produce truck, or with the line about how anyone who can drive a car can fly a plane. He opened with a complaint about his own people.
"At the Diamond Club, I referred to them as 'warts,'" DeVos says. "Randy Preston said, 'Maybe you ought to call them blemishes,' but I do not think that's strong enough."
Context helps. 60 Minutes had just aired a segment on Amway, and the mail was arriving "both pro and con." Paul Harvey had phoned to say you guys did a great job, I'm proud of ya, and the dean of an unnamed business school had gathered people in a room to watch, sure that Amway would do well. DeVos reports all of this with obvious pleasure and then, almost in the same breath, turns to the problem that would never quite leave him. Some of his highest-ranking distributors were making serious money not from soap or vitamins but from selling tapes, books, and seminars to the people below them. The company's lawyers, DeVos tells his leaders, worried whenever that income passed 10 percent of a distributor's Amway income. He was announcing that Amway would pay Business Volume on its own tapes, and that those payouts could never exceed 20 percent.
So: a salesman, on tape, telling the men who sold his tapes that they were selling too many tapes.
That was early 1983. Before the year ended, Amway and its Canadian subsidiary would plead guilty to criminal customs fraud after DeVos, Jay Van Andel, and an executive vice president had been indicted on charges of underreporting the value of goods brought into Canada from 1965 to 1980, a scheme Canadian prosecutors said had cost the government more than $28 million. The fine was $25 million Canadian, the largest Canada had ever imposed. The same year, surgeons performed the first of DeVos's two heart bypasses. Fourteen years later his heart would be replaced entirely, in England, because American hospitals had decided he was too old and too diabetic to be worth a new one.
Everything in the life radiates from that voice on the tape: the Calvinist schoolboy who thought he wasn't college material; the friend with the Model A; the schooner on the bottom off Cuba; the 1949 craze for pyramid parties; the bottle of organic cleaner; the speech called "Selling America"; the arena in Orlando; the foundation that gave away $1.1 billion and then shut itself down on schedule. DeVos believed what he was saying on that cassette. He also believed nearly everything else he ever said into a microphone, which is not the same as saying it was all true. The voice was the product. It always had been.
By the Numbers
The DeVos Ledger
$49Cost of the Nutrilite sales kit DeVos and Van Andel bought in 1949
5,000+Distributors in their Nutrilite network by 1958
$500K → $85MAmway's estimated retail sales, 1960 to 1969
$2.5MAmway's October 1994 gift to the RNC, then the largest corporate contribution to a party for a single election
$85MReported price of the Orlando Magic in 1991
71DeVos's age at his 1997 heart transplant in the United Kingdom
$1.1BLifetime giving by Rich and Helen DeVos, across 1,044 nonprofits
Under the Eaves
He was born on March 4, 1926, in Grand Rapids. The company's own founders page, written decades later, places his birth in Ada, the small town east of the city where Amway would plant its headquarters. Maybe that is a clerical error. Maybe a founding myth simply prefers its hero born where the empire stands. Either way, the boy spent the formative part of the Depression in neither place in any comfortable sense. He spent it in his grandparents' attic.
His father, Simon Cornelius DeVos, was an electrician who lost his job. The family rented out their own house to tenants who had jobs, so the mortgage could be paid, and moved upstairs with Rich's maternal grandparents. Simon sacked flour in the back room of a grocery and sold socks and underwear at a men's store on Saturdays. "We may have been poor, but we certainly had no sense of being put down," Rich recalled. "We were no poorer than anybody else in those days." Simon would later teach himself his trade well enough, according to the family's own account, to become a top General Electric salesman in Michigan. He died of a heart attack at fifty-nine. His son described him in one interview as a man who "always wanted to have his own business but he never made it." The sentence he left his son outlived him by seven decades.
— Simon DeVos, to his sonOwn your own business, Rich. It's the only way to be truly free.
The neighborhood was Dutch, Calvinist, frugal. The family's account calls 1930s Grand Rapids a Midwestern town "dominated by smokestacks and church steeples." It is a good phrase, and an exact one. The two were not in tension there. They were the same building plan.
The first sale is the story DeVos told so often it hardened into scripture. His grandfather peddled produce door to door from the back of a truck. One day there was a bag of onions left over, and the boy took it around the neighborhood, house by house, selling them one or two at a time until they were gone. "I earned just a few pennies," he wrote in his memoir, Simply Rich, "but that memorable achievement was a definitive moment in who I became as a man. It took salesmanship and persistence, but I loved it." After the onions came a paper route for the Grand Rapids Press, walked until he had saved enough for a used bicycle.
In 1986, speaking to international Amway distributors in a talk he called "The Three A's" (action, attitude, atmosphere), DeVos returned to that attic, and the passage is worth quoting at length because it contains, in miniature, his entire theory of human motivation. "I lived in my grandparents' attic when I was young because my parents couldn't afford their own home," he said. "I grew up under the rafters; under the eaves of the roof. No big problem." What mattered was the air. "The air in the home was always one of: You can do it, things are going to get better, good times are coming and we all are going to get ahead in life! My mother, my father, my grandparents always talked that way. My grandparents came to this country with nothing."
Atmosphere. He believed you could not command a person's attitude, could not demand a person's action, but you could control the air in the room, and the air would do the rest. An entire global sales apparatus was eventually built on that premise.
He was not, by his own account, a good student. At Grand Rapids Christian High School he was better known as a cheerleader (literally; he cartwheeled across the basketball court, friends remembered) and as a class officer. He graduated in 1944 as class president. The class motto was "Service for God and Country," and his valedictory address, preserved in the yearbook, closes on Proverbs: Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not upon thine own understanding. In the same yearbook a Bible teacher named Dr. Leonard Greenway wrote a line that DeVos would spend the rest of his life quoting: "To a clean cut young man with talents for leadership in God's kingdom." DeVos's gloss on it is revealing for its order of operations. "All I heard was that I wasn't college material," he said, "but Dr. Greenway said I have leadership ability."
He did try college. He enrolled at Calvin College in 1947 and lasted less than a semester, not long enough to sit for a yearbook photo. The 1947 Prism lists only his name and address in the student directory. A young woman named Helen Van Wesep graduated from Calvin with a degree in education the same year he dropped out. He met her by spotting her and a friend walking home and offering them a ride. They married on February 7, 1953. Helen insisted from the start that 10 percent of their income go to causes they believed in. The habit held for sixty-four years.
A ride offered, a partnership begun. It was not the first time.
Two Men Who Could Not Fly
Jay Van Andel was two years older and had a car. That was the whole of the original transaction. Van Andel was born June 3, 1924, the son of a Grand Rapids car dealer and the grandson of Christian and Elizabeth Van Andel, who had come over from the Netherlands in 1909. He was quiet where DeVos was loud, careful where DeVos was impulsive, and a devout member of the Christian Reformed Church who later wrote that faith meant "the living out of Biblical values of honesty, generosity, and respect for others in our everyday life." In 1940, at Grand Rapids Christian High, he and the younger boy struck a deal: twenty-five cents a week for rides to and from school in Van Andel's 1931 Model A Ford.
They called it a friendship. It was also, from the first week, a contract. Neither man ever seems to have found that strange.
When Van Andel graduated and entered the service, he left the Model A with DeVos for safekeeping. Van Andel was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces and trained bomber crews for B-17s and B-29s. DeVos enlisted shortly before his own graduation and served as a flight line mechanic on the Pacific island of Tinian. They wrote to each other constantly. "We were going to get in business together," DeVos recalled. "That much we knew."
What they knew was the intent. The business itself took several tries to find.
There are two versions of how the first one began, which is itself instructive. In the DeVos family telling, Rich put his entire $700 in military savings toward a Piper Cub airplane with Jay, and the two opened Wolverine Air Service near Grand Rapids, a flight school, though neither of them knew how to fly. They hired pilots as instructors and sold lessons with a pitch that still sounds like the man: "If you can drive a car, you can fly a plane." In a reference account drawn from Van Andel's side, the airplane was bought in 1946 by Van Andel and another partner, who sold his interest to DeVos in 1947. Either way, the operation grew to a dozen aircraft and fifteen instructors. Slack time between flights inspired a drive-in hamburger stand at the airfield, the Riverside Drive-in, one of the first in the area. One partner cooked; the other carhopped. They sold lessons by day and flipped burgers by night.
In 1948 they sold all of it and bought a boat.
The Elizabeth was a thirty-eight-foot wooden schooner that had sat too long in dry dock in Connecticut. Neither man had sailing experience. They set out in December 1948, got lost a couple of times, hugged the Eastern Seaboard southward, and in March 1949 the leaking hull went down on a shoal off the north coast of Cuba. A passing ship picked them up. Depending on who tells it, it was a freighter or an ocean liner; one account has them deposited in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They kept going over land, through the Caribbean and South America, for months.
This is the story DeVos told for the rest of his life, and it is a strange one to build a philosophy on, because the obvious moral (don't buy a rotten boat you can't sail) is the opposite of the one he drew. "Too many people never try to do anything because they're afraid," he said, "afraid of failure, that someone might criticize them or laugh at them, they don't have enough training or experience. To them I say, 'Set a goal and go for it.'" Later, in a line preserved by Pat Williams, the Magic executive who wrote an admiring book about him: "You'll never learn to sail by standing on the shore."
He did learn to sail, eventually. He became a winning competitive yachtsman. After his heart transplant he fulfilled a long-deferred dream of owning a large sailboat and taking it around the world. The first boat is still on the bottom off Cuba.
They came home with an idea about importing goods from South America (wooden handicrafts, mainly) and incorporated as the Ja-Ri Corporation, Jay's name fused with Rich's. Reference accounts mention other short-lived ventures in this period, including a table tennis manufacturing operation and a wooden toy company. None of it took. Then, in August 1949, Van Andel's second cousin Neil Maaskant came over and talked all night about vitamins.
The Year of the Pyramid Parties
It is worth remembering what else was happening in America that year.
In the winter of 1949 a craze swept the country called the pyramid friendship club. You paid a dollar or two to join and recruited two more paying members; the person at the top of the chart threw a party, collected the proceeds, and dropped out. Life magazine called it a "new mass hysteria" in its March 7, 1949, issue. It was illegal, a form of gambling, but authorities hesitated to intervene for fear of the public reaction. When the Detroit News ran stories condemning the clubs, hundreds of readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions. Newsreels showed lucky participants waving fistfuls of cash. Nearly everyone else got a dream and nothing more.
DeVos and Van Andel went into business that summer, in the middle of that weather.
Nutrilite was a California company founded by Carl Rehnborg, who had come back from years in China convinced, as one encyclopedia puts it, of the health benefits of vitamins and nutritional supplements. Rehnborg is credited with developing the first multivitamin marketed in the United States. What made his company unusual was not the pill. It was the payment structure. A distributor bought a sales kit for $49 (pointedly the cost of the kit, not a membership fee), sold the product person to person, and, crucially, earned a percentage on the sales of any new distributors they brought in. The system resembled the pyramid clubs closely enough to require constant explanation about why it was different, and it was different in one respect that mattered legally: the money moved because someone, somewhere, was buying a bottle of vitamins.
The two friends signed up in August 1949. They sold their first box the next day for $19.50. Then, by every account including their own, they lost interest for two weeks.
The second wind came from a hotel in downtown Chicago. Maaskant, now their sponsor, pushed them to attend a Nutrilite seminar, and they drove down to sit in a room with a hundred-odd people, watching promotional filmstrips and listening to company representatives and successful distributors describe what the business had done for them. Something happened in that room. On the drive home to Michigan they sold their second box.
It is the most important scene in the history of Amway, and nothing about it involves soap. Two young men who had already given up were brought back by a meeting: an atmosphere, a crowd, filmstrips, testimony. The product had not changed between the first sale and the second. The air had.
What followed was fast. One account has the pair clearing $82,000 their first year and more than $300,000 in 1950, working out of basement offices in their homes, numbers that seem high and that I have not been able to confirm elsewhere. By 1958 they had built a network of more than 5,000 distributors. Van Andel met his wife, Betty Jean Hoekstra, on a direct-selling house call in the spring of 1951. They married in August 1952. The two families settled in Ada, in adjacent houses, attended the same church, raised four children each. Reporters eventually called the founders the "Dutch Twins." The phrase was meant to be slightly mocking. It was also accurate.
In the late 1950s Nutrilite's management fell into conflict, and the distributorship that had become their livelihood suddenly looked unstable. DeVos and Van Andel moved to protect not the product but the people. In April 1959 they and some of their top distributors formed the American Way Association, a body to represent the distributors and to look for other things to sell them.
They found a bottle of cleaner.
Soap, Because Everybody Buys It
It was called Frisk, a concentrated biodegradable cleaner developed by a scientist in Ohio. DeVos and Van Andel bought the rights to manufacture and distribute it and renamed it LOC (Liquid Organic Cleaner). The company's founding product, then, was a renamed bottle of somebody else's soap. DeVos was often credited with explaining the choice in a single clause: they sold soap because everybody buys it.
The genius of that clause is easy to miss. A vitamin requires belief. A detergent requires only a sink. If the business was really about the distributor and not the product, then the ideal product was one that asked nothing of the customer at all, something consumed, depleted, rebought, the way onions are. SA8 laundry detergent followed in 1960. Then a hair care line, Satinique, in 1965, and a cosmetics line, Artistry, in 1968. In 1960 they bought half of Atco Manufacturing in Detroit, the original manufacturers of LOC, and renamed it Amway Manufacturing. In 1964 the sales, services, and manufacturing companies merged into the Amway Corporation.
The founding of Amway itself began in the basements of both men's homes in Ada. Dick DeVos, the eldest son, born October 21, 1955, was a small boy then. "I still remember when it was in the basement of our home when I was growing up," he said much later. "I remember the offices being down there and people working down there." After the first year the company moved to an abandoned service station on the site where Amway World Headquarters still stands.
The numbers in the 1960s read like a fever chart. Estimated retail sales went from $500,000 in 1960 to $35 million in 1965 and $85 million in 1969. The distributor force reached 65,000 by the mid-1960s and 100,000 by the end of the decade. By 1966 the physical plant had been expanded forty-five times. Amway crossed into Canada in 1962 and England in 1964. The founders toured the country in a vehicle they called the Showcase Bus, and the meetings they staged were, depending on who was describing them, either rallies of extraordinary warmth or something closer to revival services. Both descriptions were offered with total sincerity.
The roles settled early. Van Andel was chairman; DeVos was president. The reference books call DeVos the "charismatic motivator," which flattens him but isn't wrong. Van Andel ran the machinery. DeVos ran the room.
Then, just before midnight on July 18, 1969, the room caught fire.
An explosion in the aerosol plant in Ada set a large building, which housed offices and assembly lines, nearly fully ablaze. Employees climbed aboard tractors to drag semitrailers and a tanker out of the burning warehouse. Others were about to go into the 14,000-foot building to save files full of important documents when Van Andel arrived. DeVos recorded what his partner said in Compassionate Capitalism, published in 1993, nearly a quarter century later: "Forget the papers! Get the people out!"
It is one of the few direct quotations from Jay Van Andel that has survived the decades, and it comes to us through his partner's book about the moral superiority of capitalism to communism, set in the middle of an argument about Karl Marx's "impoverished view of the human spirit." DeVos was never able to tell a story without also selling something with it. The fire failed to slow growth. The company's first billion-dollar year came in 1980.
Selling America
Shortly after Amway's founding, DeVos was asked to speak to a small group of accountants. He decided, as the family account tells it, "not to follow the crowd of critics but instead paint the true portrait of a positive America." The little talk became "Selling America," a speech he delivered in many versions across the 1960s and 1970s, eventually pressed onto an LP record. It won the Alexander Hamilton Award for Economic Education from the Freedoms Foundation, and it made his reputation as a speaker.
The timing mattered to him. The family account notes that Amway was co-founded "around the same time Fidel Castro was establishing a communist regime in Cuba and Nikita Khrushchev was threatening to bury the United States." It does not note that the founders' first business adventure had ended on a Cuban shoal a decade earlier, but the rhyme is there to be noticed: the same coastline twice, once as wreck and once as enemy.
In a version of the speech recorded about twenty years after the first, DeVos speaks of the first "boat people" landing at Jamestown in 1607 and at Plymouth in 1620, and of their descendants in spirit arriving from Southeast Asia, from Cuba and Haiti, "people willing to do anything to be free." He was a man who had sunk his own boat off Cuba for adventure and then built a fortune speaking about those who crossed those same waters for survival. He does not seem to have noticed the asymmetry, or if he did, he did not find it troubling. "I am proud to be part of this system … this land," he concluded. "I am prepared to defend all of it in any forum at any time."
In 1976 Dow Chemical's public affairs office released a film of DeVos delivering a talk called "Man's Material Wealth." On a blackboard, more or less, sits a formula developed decades earlier by the American Economic Foundation in Cleveland: MMW = NR + HE x T. Man's Material Wealth equals Natural Resources plus Human Energy multiplied by Tools. DeVos's argument was that the ownership of the tools was what separated the free from the enslaved: socialist states owned the tools and therefore owned the people; in a free enterprise nation, men who owned their tools worked harder and took better care of them.
It is a coherent argument. It also contains a word that would become, within a few years, the most fraught in the Amway vocabulary. In the distributor networks, "tools" meant the tapes, books, and seminars.
The politics followed the speeches, and then outran them. In the early 1970s DeVos was a major funder of Third Century Publishers, founded by John Conlan and Bill Bright, an effort that the sociologists who later anatomized it called "the first major effort to build a national movement of conservative evangelicals." He was a founding member and twice president of the Council for National Policy. He served as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. He was a close friend of Gerald and Betty Ford, the Grand Rapids congressman turned president, and would serve as an honorary pallbearer at Ford's state funeral. In 1987 Ronald Reagan appointed him to the President's Commission on the HIV Epidemic, where he drew criticism for characterizing people with AIDS as wanting "special treatment."
The money is the clearest part. In October 1994 Amway gave $2.5 million to the RNC, then the largest corporate contribution to a political party for a single election. In April 1997 Rich and Helen gave $1 million more, at the time the second-largest soft-money donation on record. In 1996 Amway offered $1.3 million to underwrite Republican coverage of the national convention on Pat Robertson's Family Channel, then backed off when Democrats objected. In July 1997, Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich slipped a provision into a compromise tax bill that gave Amway and four other companies a $19 million break on their Asian branches. Molly Ivins wrote that Amway had "its own caucus in Congress," five Republican House members who were also distributors.
The family did not, finally, pretend otherwise. Betsy DeVos, the daughter of the industrialist Edgar Prince and the wife of Rich's eldest son, put it plainly in Roll Call: "I have decided … to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return."
It is the most honest sentence anyone in the family ever published about money and power, and it was written by an in-law.
Warts
The Federal Trade Commission opened its investigation of Amway in 1969, the year of the fire. Formal charges came in the mid-1970s, a few years after a South Carolina pitchman named Glenn Turner was convicted of swindling thousands through cosmetic and motivational pyramid schemes, which had made the regulators nervous about anything resembling a chart with a point at the top. One FTC lawyer offered a sentence that captured precisely what was strange about the company: "They're not in a business, but some sort of quasi-religious, socio-political organization."
The lawyer lost. An administrative law judge found in 1978 that Amway was a "genuine business opportunity," and the full Commission's 1979 ruling, In re Amway Corp., became the founding charter of the entire multilevel marketing industry. Amway was not a pyramid scheme, the FTC concluded, because distributors were not paid simply to recruit; because they were not required to stockpile unsellable inventory; because they had to make retail sales (at least ten a month) to qualify for bonuses; and because the company and its distributors had to buy back excess inventory.
But the same ruling found Amway guilty of price-fixing and of exaggerated income claims, and it ordered the company to accompany any earnings statement with the actual averages, figures that showed more than half of distributors made no money and the average distributor made less than $100 a month. In 1986 Amway paid a $100,000 civil penalty for violating that order with an ad campaign. An analysis of Wisconsin tax records from 1979 and 1980 found that the Direct Distributors (the very leadership tier DeVos addressed on his cassette) reported an average net loss of $918.
DeVos had built an institution whose legal survival depended on the distinction between a business and a movement, and whose commercial vitality depended on being a movement. That is the knot. Every subsequent controversy is that knot pulled tighter from a different direction.
— Rich DeVos, "Directly Speaking," January 1983At the Diamond Club, I referred to them as "warts." Randy Preston said, "Maybe you ought to call them 'blemishes,'" but I do not think that's strong enough.
The warts, in the main, were the tools. Beneath the official company, high-level distributors had built what one early critic called a "ghost system of non-Amway produced materials": tapes, books, rallies, functions, sold down the line to people who were told, in effect, that the tools were optional, and so was success. Dexter Yager, the most famous of the North Carolina kingmakers, told Forbes in 1985 that about two-thirds of his income came from those materials. On 60 Minutes in 1983, Yager acknowledged that he promoted Christianity through his group; a decade later, by Mother Jones's account, he used the company's voice-mail system to rally hundreds of distributors into giving $295,871 to the congressional campaign of Sue Myrick, herself a distributor who had spoken at hundreds of Amway rallies and sold $5 and $10 audiotapes.
A man named Stephen Butterfield, who spent time in the Yager organization, published a book in 1985 called Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise. "[Amway] sells a marketing and motivational system, a cause, a way of life," he wrote, "in a fervid emotional atmosphere of rallies and political religious revivalism." The word that should catch here is atmosphere. Butterfield, the hostile witness, and DeVos, the founder, were describing the same thing. They disagreed only about whether it was good.
The pattern repeated with a kind of grim ingenuity. In April 1995 distributors used Amway's Amvox voice messaging service to pass along the urban legend that Procter & Gamble's old moon-and-stars logo was a Satanic symbol; the litigation dragged on until 2008, by which point a Salt Lake City jury had awarded P&G $19.25 million against four former distributors. In Poland, Amway and Network TwentyOne sued the makers of a 1997 documentary called Witajcie w życiu ("Welcome to Life"), in which distributors compared the meetings to those of the Communist Party before it lost power. The film was banned for more than a decade. It became a bestseller on the local black market. The man who had spent forty years telling audiences that free enterprise was the opposite of communism had built something that ex-Communist Poles recognized on sight.
Dateline NBC ran a yearlong undercover investigation in 2004 and reported that the average distributor made about $1,400 a year, while a small club of perhaps twenty high-level distributors made most of their money from the tools. In 2010 Amway agreed to pay $56 million (including $22 million in products) to settle a class action alleging fraud and racketeering. In India, police arrested the CEO of Amway's subsidiary in 2013 and again in 2014; in 2022 the Enforcement Directorate attached about $79 million in assets.
None of this broke the company. It is worth pausing on that, too.
The Heart and the Heir
The bypasses came in 1983 and 1992. After the second, DeVos stepped back from day-to-day operations, and in 1993 he retired as Amway's president. His successor was his eldest son.
Dick DeVos had grown up inside the machine. As boys, he and his brother Doug had been "tapped as mini-hosts" at Amway's annual conventions, greeting attendees, clearing plates, ferrying guests to tennis courts and waterskiing, and eventually speaking in front of groups and giving product demonstrations. "It was kind of like a Junior Achievement atmosphere contained inside of Amway," Dick said. "We just hung around the company. It was your social activity." He joined formally in 1974, at around eighteen, while taking night classes at Northwood University, and later said he did "every job there was to do at Amway." In the mid-1980s he became the vice president responsible for international operations. When he took that job, sales outside the United States were about 5 percent of the total. When he left it six years later, they were about half.
That number explains the entire second act of the company. The American distributor force, the one that drew the FTC and 60 Minutes and Molly Ivins, was not where the future lay. Amway had gone to Australia in 1971, Japan in 1979, Latin America in 1985, Thailand in 1987. It entered China in 1995; three years later Beijing banned all direct selling after pyramid-scheme riots, and Amway survived by repositioning around retail stores staffed by an independent sales force. When China rewrote its rules in 2005, Amway was among the first licensed to resume direct sales, under conditions that barred commissions on recruited distributors altogether. By 2008 China was its largest market. By 2014 Nutrilite was, by Euromonitor's count, the best-selling vitamin and supplement brand in the world. In the United States, meanwhile, Amway had dwindled to the point where the company posted a web page answering the question "Does Amway still exist?"
The founder's message, it turned out, sold better abroad than at home. The American Way, exported.
The heart failed for good in 1997. DeVos was turned down for a transplant in the United States because of his age, seventy-one, and his diabetes. He received a heart in the United Kingdom instead. He and Helen read Philippians 4:4–7 every morning in the hospital while he waited (the peace of God, which passeth all understanding), and he later said, "The Lord lifted the fear from me." Asked how he survived, he gave a single explanation: "The grace of God and nothing else." He wrote a book about it, Hope From My Heart, ten lessons for life, and in 2002 became chairman of the national speakers bureau of the United Network for Organ Sharing.
He kept talking. Of course he did.
Dick's tenure was turbulent in its own way. In 1999 the families launched an internet-based sister company called Quixtar, which by 2001 had absorbed virtually all of Amway's North American business; in 2000 Dick oversaw the creation of Alticor as a holding company and, over twenty months, cut more than 1,300 jobs, mostly in Michigan. He left in 2002, and in 2006 he ran for governor, spent nearly $35 million of his own money, and lost to Jennifer Granholm by fourteen points. The campaign turned, a CBS reporter judged, on a debate in which Granholm "went for the jugular" over a nursing home investment and DeVos answered limply. "My mother taught me to be respectful and polite," he said years afterward, "but sometimes I took that advice too far."
It is an odd confession from the son of the most persuasive man in Michigan: that he had learned the manners and not the voice.
Why Not Us? Why Not Now?
In 1991, after failing to land a Major League Baseball expansion franchise for Orlando, the DeVos family bought the NBA's Orlando Magic from a group led by the real estate developer William duPont III. The price was reported as $85 million, though the Associated Press, in its obituary, gave it as $70 million. Dick ran the team for its first years; an Orlando Sentinel columnist asked in 1991 whether the gentle heir was "strong enough" for the job, and answered yes. Rich described the family as "caretakers." The real owners, he said, were the fans.
He was, by every account, an unusual owner. He came into the locker room. He hosted players at his home. He gave Shaquille O'Neal, the first-round pick of 1992, a birthday present. Before a playoff run in which the press gave the Magic little chance, he asked the team a question that became its rallying cry: "Why not us? Why not now?" The Magic reached the Finals in 1995 and lost. Shaq left for Los Angeles. The team declined far enough to land the first pick in 2004 and used it on a high schooler named Dwight Howard, who years later, earning $17 million a year, said of his owner: "We're both Christians, so we tithe. Rich is always talking about how to build yourself up."
The arena was another matter. In 2001 DeVos's company asked for $121 million in tourist taxes for a new building, said the team was losing $10 million a year in the old one, and openly threatened to move the franchise. He said local hoteliers needed to get their "grubby little fingers" off the hotel-room taxes. The campaign collapsed; Forbes later called it "clumsy." He tried again, more carefully, and by 2007 a deal was done. State and local taxpayers put in $330 million; the Magic said the family contributed more than $100 million. The Amway Center opened in October 2010: 18,500 seats, sixty luxury boxes, a $10,000-a-year Ritz-Carlton club in a bunker beside the court. NBA commissioner David Stern called it the best building in basketball. "We needed a new arena to survive," DeVos told Forbes, at eighty-four, sitting courtside with sixty family members and friends the night the Heat came to town.
The arena bore the name of the company until December 2023, when Kia bought the naming rights. The building he fought for now carries a Korean carmaker's name. Amway's own sales, by then, came mostly from Asia.
The Last Sale
Before Orlando there was Grand Rapids, and Grand Rapids was where he meant to be judged.
In 1978 Amway bought the Pantlind Hotel on Monroe Avenue, then abandoned and boarded up, a downtown landmark going the way of so many in midsized industrial cities. The company spent $24 million restoring it and added a twenty-nine-story glass tower; it reopened in September 1981 as the Amway Grand Plaza, with Gerald Ford at the ribbon-cutting. "It was a total gamble," DeVos said thirty years later. A convention center and a performance hall rose next door. The city's former mayor, George Heartwell, credited the hotel with triggering "that spillover of investment into downtown." Then came the rest: DeVos Place, DeVos Performance Hall, the Helen DeVos Children's Hospital, the Cook-DeVos Center for Health Services, Grand Valley State's downtown campus (which Rich led the fundraising to build), and the merger of two rival hospitals into the system that became Spectrum Health. The Grand Rapids Symphony received the couple's support for fifty-three consecutive years.
"If there's no Grand Rapids sidewalk not paved by Amway," a student editor at Calvin wrote after his death, "there's no square inch of Calvin not paid by Amway." It was meant as a joke and a complaint and a fact all at once, which was the only register in which his hometown ever quite managed to discuss him.
He gave the institutions money and he gave them sentences. In January 2010, at Calvin's January Series lecture, a local independent journalist went to hear him and came away appalled. DeVos opened by thanking the crowd for its warm welcome and remarking that it surprised him, because "a prophet is never welcomed in his own country." He said Amway was sending supplies to Haiti because "the Haitians need us," but that they shouldn't be given everything or they wouldn't learn to do for themselves. Discussing his opposition to health care reform, he said: "We tried all kinds of things to defeat it and then along came this guy from Massachusetts. The hand of God is so evident." The guy was Scott Brown. The book DeVos was promoting that day was Ten Powerful Phrases for Positive People: you can do it, I believe in you, I trust you, I respect you.
He signed his letters "Love ya." He was asked about it once. "I don't really know what sincerely is supposed to mean," he said. "But 'Love ya' sends a definite message." Thousands of people kept those notes. Some of them left tributes after his death mentioning the handwritten cards, the handshake, the way he looked at them.
The man who signed "Love ya" also spent decades opposing same-sex marriage and funding the organizations that fought it. He told a ballroom full of Detroit Chamber of Commerce members on Mackinac Island, after an introduction listing his accomplishments, "Let me tell you who I really am. I'm a sinner saved by grace — a Christian, saved by Jesus Christ." He introduced himself that way for the rest of his life. Every Christmas he read the Nativity story aloud to Amway employees and called those sessions "the most important meetings I've ever run." He kept, as a personal emblem, a compass rose with four points: faith, family, philanthropy, freedom.
Helen died on October 18, 2017. Rich died at home in Ada eleven months later, on September 6, 2018, of complications from an infection, surrounded by family. He was ninety-two. At LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, George W. Bush stood up and said, "My name is George," and got a laugh, and then got another one: "I was known as the compassionate conservative, and he was the compassionate capitalist." Steve Van Andel, Jay's son and Amway's chairman, said that "in many ways Rich was the heart and soul of Amway." Jay had died in December 2004, of Parkinson's, the same year Betty died of Alzheimer's.
On May 1, 2024, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation announced that it was closing after fifty-four years and $1.1 billion given to 1,044 nonprofits. It had always been the plan. "Mom and Dad were firm believers that 'now is the best time,'" Doug DeVos said, "as it's the only time we have."
There was one deal he never closed. The Christian Reformed Church in North America, his lifelong denomination, had broken away from the Reformed Church in America in 1857, and the split had run straight through his own family, dividing his grandparents. DeVos spent the last decade of his life trying to bring the two churches back together. He did not succeed. The greatest salesman Grand Rapids ever produced, the man who sold soap in a hundred countries and tax money to Orange County and a presidential commission on a philosophy of hope, could not sell two congregations of Dutch Calvinists on sitting in the same room again.
It ends, then, the way it began: a boy on a sidewalk in Grand Rapids, a grandfather's truck at the curb, a bag of onions left over from the route. He knocks. Someone answers. He sells them one, maybe two, and goes to the next door, and the next, until the bag is empty.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is not an endorsement. Rich DeVos built one of the most durable consumer enterprises of the twentieth century and one of its most contested; the methods that produced the first result also produced the second, and an honest playbook has to hold both. The principles below are drawn from the record in Part I: what he did, what it produced, and where it broke. Several are double-edged by design. Operators should take the edge they need and notice the other one.
The principles
- 1.Sell the why before the what.
- 2.Engineer the atmosphere, not the attitude.
- 3.Choose a product that asks nothing of the customer.
- 4.When the supplier wobbles, own the network.
- 5.Split the partnership by temperament.
- 6.Make your failures cheap and your stories expensive.
- 7.Treat recognition as a currency.
- 8.Name the warts before someone else does.
- 9.Watch the business growing on top of your business.
- 10.Hand the frontier to the heir.
- 11.Make the hometown part of the balance sheet.
- 12.Schedule the foundation's death.
A
The Arc of Rich DeVos
From a $49 sales kit to a $1.1 billion philanthropic sunset.
1940
Pays Jay Van Andel 25 cents a week for rides to Grand Rapids Christian High.
1949
Schooner sinks off Cuba in March; the pair sign on as Nutrilite distributors in August.
1959
American Way Association formed in April; LOC is the only product.
1969
Aerosol plant fire on July 18; FTC opens its investigation.
1979
FTC rules Amway is not a pyramid scheme but orders income disclosures.
1983
"Directly Speaking" tape; Canadian customs fraud plea and CAD $25M fine; first bypass.
1991
Family buys the Orlando Magic.
1993
Retires as president; Dick DeVos succeeds him.
1997
Heart transplant in the United Kingdom at 71.
2018
Dies September 6 at home in Ada, age 92.
2024
Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation sunsets after 54 years.
Principle 1
Sell the why before the what
The reviewer of Simply Rich caught something DeVos said about his own development: at a certain point he began speaking about the "why," why building a business mattered to America. "Selling America" never mentioned LOC. The 1976 Dow film never mentioned SA8. DeVos understood that a distributor who believed in the cause would find a way to move the product, while a distributor who believed only in the product would quit when the first neighbor said no, which is exactly what he and Van Andel did after their first $19.50 Nutrilite sale, before a Chicago hotel room full of believers sent them back out.
The mechanism is simple and underused: a mission gives people a reason to endure the boring middle of a job. The risk is equally simple. A mission strong enough to make people endure losses (and the FTC's averages say most Amway distributors did take losses) can keep them enduring long after the economics should have told them to stop.
Tactic: Write the one-paragraph case for why your work matters that never mentions your product, and test whether it moves a skeptical stranger.
Principle 2
Engineer the atmosphere, not the attitude
The Three A's speech is the most practical thing DeVos ever said. "The atmosphere is the thing we control," he told distributors in 1986. "Once you understand that it's the atmosphere, then you'll stop beating your people over the head on attitude, you'll stop trying to demand action, because you can't anyway." He traced the idea to an attic in the Depression, where the house was cramped but the air said you can do it.
Most managers try to change behavior directly through targets and exhortation. DeVos argued you get further by changing the room: who is in it, what gets celebrated, what language is normal. Conventions, rallies, the Showcase Bus, the "Love ya" notes were all atmosphere technology. Stephen Butterfield, the critic, described the same thing as "a fervid emotional atmosphere," which is a warning worth keeping: an atmosphere strong enough to lift people is strong enough to keep them from seeing clearly.
Tactic: Audit the last three meetings you ran for what the room felt like when people walked in, and change one structural element before you change one target.
Principle 3
Choose a product that asks nothing of the customer
Nutrilite asked for belief: that a supplement would make you healthier. LOC asked for a dirty counter. "Everybody buys soap" was not a slogan about quality (Consumer Reports later ranked Amway's detergents ninth and eighteenth of twenty), it was a statement about friction. When the real engine of a business is the seller's network, the ideal product is consumable, universally needed, and boring enough not to require persuasion.
The broader lesson applies well beyond direct selling. If your competitive advantage lies in distribution, relationships, or channel, don't spend your novelty budget on the product. Spend it where your advantage is, and make the product the easiest possible yes.
Tactic: Identify where your real edge lives (product, channel, or brand) and strip unnecessary complexity out of the other two.
Principle 4
When the supplier wobbles, own the network
By 1958 DeVos and Van Andel had 5,000 distributors and no control over the company whose product those distributors sold. When Nutrilite's management fell into conflict, they did not wait. In April 1959 they formed the American Way Association to represent the distributors and find new products. The network was the asset; the vitamins were replaceable. They then integrated backward, buying half of LOC's manufacturer in 1960, merging the operating companies in 1964, and finally, in 1972, buying a controlling interest in Nutrilite itself, the company that had started them. Full ownership came in 1994.
The sequence is instructive: first protect the relationships, then secure supply, then absorb the former parent. Each move was defensive before it was ambitious.
Tactic: List the one outside party whose instability could orphan your customers, and build the structure that would let you keep those customers if that party failed.
Principle 5
Split the partnership by temperament
The press called them the "Dutch Twins," and in background they were nearly identical: same church, same high school, same war, adjacent houses, four children each. In temperament they were not. Van Andel was chairman, the operator who stopped employees from running into a burning building for files. DeVos was president, the voice. The two versions of Wolverine Air Service's founding (DeVos's $700 versus Van Andel's earlier partner) hint at two men keeping slightly different ledgers of the same history, which is what durable partnerships tend to look like up close.
Shared values let them trust each other. Different temperaments let them cover more ground. Partnerships formed between two charismatics or two operators rarely last sixty-four years.
Tactic: Before taking a co-founder, write down which of you will run the room and which will run the machine, and if the answer is the same person, keep looking.
Principle 6
Make your failures cheap and your stories expensive
A flight school run by two men who couldn't fly. A drive-in. A schooner neither could sail, lost off Cuba. Ja-Ri's wooden imports. A table tennis operation. Most of DeVos's early ventures failed or fizzled, and none of them ruined him, because each was small, fast, and exited. What survived was the story. DeVos turned the sinking of the Elizabeth into a decades-long parable about courage, and "You'll never learn to sail by standing on the shore" became a teaching line.
His stated decision rule, as recorded by Pat Williams, was to act on 50 to 75 percent of the facts and correct course afterward. That works when the downside of a wrong call is a boat, not a company. DeVos's wisdom here is less "be bold" than "be bold where it's survivable, then harvest the lesson in public."
Tactic: Before your next experiment, cap the loss at something you could narrate as a funny story in five years, then go.
Principle 7
Treat recognition as a currency
Asked by Selling Power how to motivate people, DeVos chuckled at the question's complexity and then answered in three words: "Recognition, rewards, and money." Note the order. Amway's level system (Direct Distributors, Platinums, Diamonds), its Diamond Club gatherings in Hawaii, its conventions where the founders' children greeted guests: all of it paid in a currency that cost the company relatively little and that many participants valued enormously.
The data show the other side. In 2005 Platinums were about 0.17 percent of active distributors and Diamonds about 0.01 percent, while the average active distributor earned $115 a month. Recognition is powerful precisely because it can substitute for money. Leaders who use it should be honest about when it is a complement and when it is a replacement.
Tactic: Design one form of public recognition for your team this quarter, and check that it rewards something that actually creates value, not merely activity.
Principle 8
Name the warts before someone else does
The January 1983 cassette is a model of a founder getting ahead of a crisis. 60 Minutes had aired. DeVos went directly to his leadership tier, by name and by role, and called the problems "warts," refusing the softer "blemishes." He explained the legal exposure and changed the compensation rules. The communication was direct, specific, and in his own voice.
It also shows the limit. The tools problem was still the central allegation in the 2004 Dateline investigation, the 2007 UK action, and the 2010 class action settlement. Naming a wart is not removing it. DeVos was candid about the symptoms and never fully willing to cut into the system that produced them, because that system also produced the growth.
Tactic: When something is going wrong, tell your most important constituency in your own words first, then set a date by which you'll judge whether the fix actually worked.
Principle 9
Watch the business growing on top of your business
The most dangerous thing that happened to Amway was not done by Amway. It was done by its most successful distributors, who built a second business (tapes, books, rallies) on the trust the first business had generated. Dexter Yager said two-thirds of his income came from it. The company's legal standing rested on retail sales of products; the field's incentives increasingly pointed elsewhere. Every platform faces a version of this: the resellers, agencies, or power users who monetize your community in ways you didn't design and can't fully see.
L
Two Ledgers
The pitch versus the record, drawn from Part I sources.
| The pitch | The record | Signal |
|---|---|---|
| "Our door is open to anyone." | FTC 1979: more than half of distributors make no money; average under $100 a month. | Risk |
| Distributors own their businesses. | Upper-tier distributors earned heavily from tools sold to their own downlines. | Risk |
| Soap, because everybody buys it. | Retail sales from $500K (1960) to $85M (1969). | Scale |
| Selling the American Way. | By the 2000s most sales came from Asia; China became the top market. | Try |
| "Get the people out!" | 1969 fire did not slow growth; first $1B year in 1980. | Scale |
| Freedom from government interference. | $2.5M to the RNC in 1994; a $19M tax break in 1997. | Scan |
Tactic: Map who earns money from your customers besides you, and decide deliberately which of those flows you'll bless, regulate, or end.
Principle 10
Hand the frontier to the heir
DeVos did not hand his son the stable American core. Dick's formative assignment was international, and over six years foreign sales went from about 5 percent of the total to about 50 percent. That is how you test an heir: on new ground where the founder's voice doesn't automatically carry and the results are legible. It also saved the company, because the domestic market was eroding into a business that had to post a page asking whether it still existed.
The children had been in the building since the basement years, greeting convention guests and giving demonstrations. Succession was not an event in 1993. It was a twenty-year apprenticeship that ended in a title.
Tactic: Give your likely successor the part of the business with the most upside and the least inherited goodwill, and judge them on what they build there.
Principle 11
Make the hometown part of the balance sheet
The Pantlind Hotel was, in DeVos's words, "a total gamble." Amway needed a place to host distributors; Grand Rapids needed a reason for people to come downtown. The $24 million renovation served both, and the convention center, performance hall, hospitals, and university campus that followed turned a corporate headquarters city into a civic project with the company's name on it. Distributors visiting Ada were walking through a demonstration of the founders' values.
The Orlando arena shows the same instinct handled badly: threats, "grubby little fingers," a failed first campaign. The difference wasn't strategy. It was standing. In Grand Rapids DeVos invested first and asked later. In Orlando he asked first.
Tactic: Before asking your community for anything, make one investment in it that would be worth making even if it never paid you back.
Principle 12
Schedule the foundation's death
Helen insisted on the 10 percent tithe from their first year of marriage, and the giving compounded with the fortune to $1.1 billion across 1,044 organizations. Then, on May 1, 2024, the foundation closed, as planned. "Their intention was never for their foundation to live on forever," Doug DeVos said, "but to lay the groundwork for future generations." The sunset forced the children to build their own giving vehicles rather than inherit a bureaucracy.
There's a business analogue. Institutions designed to outlive their founders often drift from purpose; institutions designed with an end date have to finish their work. DeVos could not finish the church reunion he wanted. He did finish the foundation.
Tactic: For any program or fund you launch, set an end date at the outset and revisit the decision on purpose rather than by default.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Rich DeVosWe were just two guys from Ada, Michigan, USA, who wanted to have a business of our own.
— Rich DeVosThe first founding principle of this business is our door is open to anyone — the uneducated, the impoverished, the people who don't speak well. Our doors are open.
— Rich DeVos, "The Three A's," 1986Because you cannot hear the hopeless, the discouraged, those who have given up; because these and a billion other persons have lost hope, Amway was born, because we offer that hope to those people.
— Rich DeVos, to the Detroit Chamber of Commerce on Mackinac IslandLet me tell you who I really am. I'm a sinner saved by grace — a Christian, saved by Jesus Christ. That's who I really am.
— Rich DeVos, on signing his lettersI don't really know what sincerely is supposed to mean. But "Love ya" sends a definite message.
Maxims
- Air before action. Change the atmosphere of the room and attitude and action tend to follow.
- The cause carries the product. People endure the hard middle of a job for a reason, not a commission.
- Sell what everyone already buys. When your edge is distribution, make the product a frictionless yes.
- Protect the network first. Products are replaceable; the relationships that move them are not.
- Fail small, tell it big. A sunk schooner is survivable; a well-told sunk schooner is an asset.
- Recognition is cheap to give and expensive to fake. It works best paid alongside real earnings, not instead of them.
- Call a wart a wart. Euphemism delays the fix; candor buys time to make it.
- Watch your field's side business. What your best partners sell on top of you can become what you're judged by.
- Test heirs on the frontier. Hand successors the part of the business where inherited goodwill doesn't apply.
- Give with an end date. An institution that knows it will close has to finish its work.
