Jay Van Andel

Jay Van Andel was the quieter half of one of the most consequential partnerships in American sales history, the strategist and engineer to Richard DeVos's evangelist. Together the two boyhood friends from the Dutch Reformed enclave of Grand Rapids, Michigan, built Amway, a contraction of "American Way", from the basements of their two houses in 1959 into a multilevel selling empire that, at its 1981 peak, moved $1.2 billion in soap, cosmetics, and household goods through more than a million independent distributors in dozens of countries ^[4][9]. Where Henry Ford sold a product, Van Andel and DeVos sold a possibility: that any housewife or factory worker could become a capitalist by selling to neighbors and recruiting them to sell in turn ^[4][9].

The partnership predated the product. Van Andel and DeVos met around 1940 at Grand Rapids Christian High School, where Jay charged Rich a quarter a week to ride to school in his Model A Ford ^[1][4]. After Army Air Corps service in World War II, they tried a flying school (Wolverine Air Service) and a drive-in restaurant, then in 1948 bought a 38-foot schooner, the Elizabeth, to sail the Caribbean and South America despite barely knowing how to sail, the boat's dried-out hull leaked and she sank off the Cuban coast ^[1][6]. Rescued, they pressed on to South America by steamer, rail, and plane, an episode they later mythologized as proof that you never quit even when your ship is literally sinking ^[6].

The real opportunity came back home. In 1949 a cousin introduced them to Nutrilite, a California food-supplement company that paid not only on personal sales but on the sales of recruits, the multilevel model in embryo ^[1][4]. Operating through their Ja-Ri Corporation (from their first names), they built a Nutrilite organization of some 5,000 distributors by the late 1950s ^[1][4]. Worried about Nutrilite's stability and internal feuds, in April 1959 they and their top distributors founded the American Way Association and the Amway Sales Corporation to control their own products and rules ^[1][4]. The first flagship product was a biodegradable concentrate, Frisk, soon renamed L.O.C. (Liquid Organic Cleaner) ^[4][6].

Growth was explosive: roughly $500,000 in retail sales in 1960, $35 million by 1965, $85 million by 1969 ^[3]. But the same model that drove the growth drew scrutiny. From 1969 the Federal Trade Commission investigated whether Amway was an illegal pyramid scheme; in a landmark 1979 ruling the Commission held it was not, because distributors made money from real retail sales, not merely from recruiting, protected by buy-back, ten-customer, and seventy-percent rules, while still ordering Amway to stop fixing retail prices and exaggerating distributors' likely earnings ^[7]. That decision became the legal charter for the entire modern multilevel-marketing industry ^[7].

Van Andel's public standing peaked as chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1979–1980, a conservative tribune of free enterprise ^[2][4]. Then came the reckoning that the founders' own memoirs minimize: in 1982 Van Andel, DeVos, and a top executive were criminally indicted in Canada for an elaborate customs fraud, and in November 1983 the corporations pleaded guilty and paid C$25 million, at the time the largest fine in Canadian history, after a scheme of dummy invoices used to underpay import duties between 1965 and 1980 ^[5][8]. The man who preached the American way had run, in a Canadian court's words, "a premeditated and deliberate course of conduct" ^[8].

Van Andel spent his last decades giving the fortune away, pouring it into Grand Rapids and into the Van Andel Institute for biomedical research, while Parkinson's disease slowly silenced him ^[2][10]. He died in December 2004 with a fortune Forbes put above $2 billion, a divisive legacy, and a creed he never abandoned: that wealth was worth making chiefly so that it could be created again and given away ^[2][9].

Jay Van Andel was born June 3, 1924, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, into a tight-knit Dutch Reformed community whose grandparents had emigrated from the Netherlands in 1909 ^[4][2]. His father, James Van Andel, ran a car dealership; the family worshipped in the Christian Reformed Church, and the twin pillars of Calvinist faith and small-business striving shaped Jay's entire moral vocabulary ^[4][2]. He attended Grand Rapids Christian High School, where he met Richard DeVos, two years younger, and began ferrying him to school for twenty-five cents a week in his Model A, the first transaction of a sixty-year partnership ^[1][4].

World War II interrupted everything. Van Andel served as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, training bomber crews; DeVos served too, and both returned to Grand Rapids with the restless ambition of young veterans ^[2][4]. They went into business together at once, running the Wolverine Air Service flying school and a drive-in restaurant before selling both ^[1][4]. In 1948 they sank their savings into the schooner Elizabeth and set off to sail the Caribbean and South America, a near-fatal adventure when the vessel went down off Cuba, after which they completed the journey by other means and returned home looking for a business they could build for good ^[1][6].

That business found them in 1949, when a cousin of Van Andel's introduced the pair to Nutrilite food supplements and its commission-on-recruits selling plan ^[1][4]. Van Andel, methodical, engineering-minded, the one who drafted the rules and ran the manufacturing, proved the natural complement to the charismatic, platform-speaking DeVos ^[4][9]. Within a decade the quiet half of the partnership would co-author a wholly new American institution.

Jay Van Andel's most lasting invention was less a product than a form: the modern multilevel-marketing company, blessed into legality by the 1979 FTC decision that his own firm provoked and won ^[7]. After Amway, thousands of MLM companies adopted the same architecture of independent distributors, downlines, and overrides, for better and for worse, a structure that has lifted some sellers and ensnared many more in inventory and unmet promises ^[7][9]. Van Andel also helped make Grand Rapids a redoubt of organized political conservatism; the Van Andel and DeVos fortunes underwrote Republican and free-market causes for decades, a civic and ideological footprint that long outlived him ^[2].

In his hometown the name is carved into the landscape, the Van Andel Arena, the Van Andel Museum Center, and above all the Van Andel Institute, the biomedical research center he founded in 1996 and endowed with much of a fortune Forbes valued above $2 billion at his death ^[2][10][9]. Historians and critics render a split verdict that the best account must hold whole: Van Andel was a genuine builder and philanthropist whose model widened the idea of who could be an entrepreneur, and he was a convicted customs fraudster whose company faced enduring questions about whether the dream it sold was, for most distributors, attainable ^[5][8][7]. He died December 7, 2004, having outlived his wife Betty by months, his voice taken by Parkinson's but his creed intact ^[2][10].