Amway co-founder DeVos dies
Michigan native used his fortune to buy NBA team, fund conservative causes
Richard DeVos, who became a billionaire as a co-founder of Amway, and who later became the owner of the Orlando Magic professional basketball team and a contributor to conservative candidates, died Sept. 6 at his home in Ada, Michigan. He was 92.
Amway, a home products sales company, announced DeVos’ death, saying the cause was complications from an infection. He received a heart transplant in 1997.
DeVos, who was the father-in-law of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, co-founded Amway in 1959 with Jay Van Andel, a high school friend from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Working at first in a basement and later at a converted gas station, DeVos and Van Andel built the privately held Amway into a billiondollar company by 1980, selling such diverse products as cleaning products, cosmetics, jewelry and kitchen appliances.
“We call our company Amway,” DeVos said, “because the American way of private ownership and free enterprise is the best way.”
Amway was built on a highly personalized sales style that relied on a vast army of “distributors” or doorto-door salespeople. Before they launched the company, DeVos and Van Andel spent a decade refining their sales technique while peddling vitamins.
Van Andel was Amway’s longtime chairman, and DeVos served as president and, in many ways, the company’s public face. At revivalstyle meetings of his company’s distributors, he often invoked the conservative values that guided his personal and professional life.
“It’s the foundation of my life,” he told the Grand Rapids Press in 2008. “It’s the foundation of my business. We’re all sinners, but we all have potential for greatness as well.”
Devos drove a green Rolls-Royce, maintained a fleet of corporate jets and made round-the-world voyages on a huge yacht. At times, he flaunted his wealth to inspire his international army of distributors, which the company said numbered more than 1 million.
“The great performers in Amway are a unique breed of people. Those are the real goers, the tigers of the world,” DeVos told The Washington Post in 1981. “We recognize their self-worth. We keep telling them we love them for whatever they do.”
People in Amway’s sales force worked on commission, increasing their earnings by recruiting other distributors in a practice known as multilevel marketing. New salespeople were required to buy their wares from established distributors and a portion of each person’s sales trickled upstream through the company’s network.
In the early 1980s, the two Amway founders were listed among the five richest people in America. At the time of DeVos’ death, Forbes magazine estimated his family’s wealth at $5.5 billion.
Amway’s business practices also came under scrutiny by regulatory authorities.