Richard M. DeVos

Richard Marvin DeVos did not invent direct selling, multi-level marketing, or the door-to-door pitch, all of them predated him. What he and his lifelong partner Jay Van Andel did was fuse the mechanics of person-to-person selling with something closer to a faith: a relentless, almost evangelical optimism about ordinary people, free enterprise, and the American Way ^[1][2]. From the basements of two adjoining houses in Ada, Michigan, the pair built the Amway Corporation into one of the largest privately held companies on earth, a network of millions of independent distributors moving cleaning products, vitamins, and cosmetics, and, just as importantly, selling one another the dream of being their own boss ^[2][3].

The company they incorporated in 1959 was almost absurdly small at the start: a single product, a biodegradable cleaner called Frisk (soon renamed L.O.C., "Liquid Organic Cleaner"), sold by a handful of distributors recruited largely from the Nutrilite vitamin network DeVos and Van Andel had already worked for a decade ^[4]. The growth was vertiginous. Sales reached roughly $500,000 in 1960, about $35 million by 1965, and crossed the $1 billion mark in estimated retail volume by 1980 ^[4][6]. DeVos was the voice of the enterprise, the motivator whose recorded talk "Selling America" circulated on cassette through living-room recruiting meetings, the man who could make a struggling housewife or factory worker believe that persistence alone separated them from prosperity ^[1][5].

That same machine drew sustained scrutiny. In 1979, after a four-year investigation, the Federal Trade Commission ruled in In re Amway Corp. that the company was not an illegal pyramid scheme, but only because of "safeguards" Amway had built in (the 70-percent rule, the ten-customer rule, the buy-back guarantee), while ordering it to stop fixing retail prices and to stop exaggerating how much money distributors actually made ^[7]. Four years later came a harder blow: in November 1983 Amway and its Canadian subsidiary pleaded guilty to defrauding the Canadian government of more than C$28 million in customs duties through fake invoices and a dummy corporation, paying a C$25 million fine, then the largest criminal penalty in Canadian history. DeVos and Van Andel personally signed a statement accepting "full responsibility" ^[8][9].

DeVos was, in the end, a salesman who sold a worldview as much as a product. He poured his fortune and his energy into conservative politics, becoming finance chairman of the Republican National Committee in the early 1980s and one of the party's most generous donors for decades, and into his hometown, where the DeVos name was bolted onto a hospital, a concert hall, a downtown hotel, and a university business school ^[2][3][10]. His daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos would become U.S. Secretary of Education; his son Dick succeeded him as Amway's president ^[3][10].

He was also, by his own telling, a man for whom belief was the operating system. Survivor of two heart-bypass operations and, in 1997, a heart transplant in England at age seventy-one after being turned down in the United States, DeVos kept preaching the doctrine that had built him: that optimism is a choice, that capitalism is a moral good, and that the only thing standing between a person and what they want is usually the will to try ^[2][5][11]. To admirers he was the embodiment of the self-made American; to critics he was the genial face of a recruiting system that enriched the few at the top while most distributors earned next to nothing ^[12].

The verdict the best accounts settle on is a double one: a genuinely gifted motivator and builder who widened the idea of who could own a business, and the architect of a model whose promises ran perpetually ahead of its results ^[2][7][12].

Richard Marvin DeVos was born March 4, 1926, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, into a Dutch Reformed immigrant community in which faith, frugality, and free enterprise were practically a single doctrine ^[2][3]. The family lost their home during the Depression and moved in with relatives, an experience DeVos returned to often; his father, an electrician, drilled into him the conviction that he should one day run his own business rather than work for someone else ^[2][11].

The defining relationship of his life began at Grand Rapids Christian High School around 1940, when an older student named Jay Van Andel offered him a ride to school in his Model A in exchange for twenty-five cents a week, the origin story both men told for the rest of their lives ^[1][4]. The friendship survived service in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and afterward the two threw themselves into a string of joint ventures: a flying-instruction and air-charter service, a drive-in restaurant, and, most romantically, a battered schooner they sailed toward South America in 1948 to see the world, only to have it sink off the coast of Cuba, forcing a rescue and a long overland journey home ^[1][2].

The ventures that mattered came next. In 1949 a relative introduced the pair to Nutrilite, a California maker of food supplements sold through a person-to-person, multi-level distribution plan in which sellers earned both on their own sales and on the sales of those they recruited ^[4]. Operating as the Ja-Ri Corporation, DeVos and Van Andel proved formidable recruiters, building a downline thousands strong ^[1][4]. When Nutrilite's fortunes wobbled at the end of the 1950s, the two decided to stop selling someone else's products and build their own company, and on November 9, 1959, they founded Amway ^[4][6].

Richard DeVos left a fortune estimated in the billions and a model that reshaped how millions of people thought about work: not as a job held but as a business owned, however modestly ^[2][3]. Amway became the template and recruiting ground for a whole industry of multi-level marketing, and its mixture of commerce, community, and conservative-Christian values made it a cultural as much as a corporate phenomenon ^[2][12]. His name endures across Grand Rapids, on the Helen DeVos Children's Hospital, DeVos Performance Hall, the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, and his family became a force in national Republican politics, with daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos serving as U.S. Secretary of Education and son Dick running Amway after him ^[3][10].

The assessment remains contested. To his admirers DeVos was a self-made American original who democratized entrepreneurship and gave hundreds of thousands of ordinary people a shot at owning something ^[1][3]. To his critics he was the smiling architect of a system whose rewards flowed overwhelmingly to those at the top while most distributors earned little or lost money, and whose company's record, the FTC order, the Canadian fraud plea, belied the gospel of fair dealing it preached ^[7][8][12]. What is beyond dispute is that he was one of the most effective sellers of optimism the postwar United States produced, and that he believed every word of it.