Amway

        Network Marketing has been around for over 50 years. In 1934 California Vitamin Company came up with a concept of Multi Level Marketing. This company started out as a direct sales company signing up sales people that would use the product for their personal use and sell to it to their family and friends. In the process they would earn an extra $50 per month which was a substantial income at that time. Their friends and relatives not only liked the product but they started to realise that they could benefit financially themselves by buying the product at the wholesale price and in turn selling it to others.

In 1943, California Vitamins changed their name to Nutralite Corporation which implemented the first true Multi Level Marketing compensation plan. Everyone involved in the company got paid on multiple levels of sales made.

In 1949, Jay Van Andle and Richard Marvin DeVoss joined Nutralite Corporation as Members and for the next ten years the company grew and prospered. They regarded conventional sales jobs as unfair - being paid only once for the work that they did even when the company continued to make a profit from their labours for many years afterwards. They believed that they should be paid relative to the benefit the company continued to get from their original work. In 1959 Jay and Richard decided to go in a different direction and start their own Multi Level Company called Amway.

In 1975, US consumer protection agency Federal Trade Commission decided to take Amway to court because they thought that Amway was involved in a Pyramid Scheme. A pyramid scheme is when you sell a system without a product. A number of different pyramid schemes sprang up with the advent of MLM.

Because Amway was the biggest MLM distribution company at the time, the Federal Trade Commission decided to make an example of them to prove that Amway was involved in an illegal business. For four years Amway fought in the courts to prove that MLM was a legitimate business finally winning the case in1979. This paved the way for many more MLM companies to enter the industry.

In the early Eighties the Multi Level Marketing term was replaced by Network Marketing. Right now Network Marketing is poised to become a giant that will out grow any other form of conventional business. Currently it is the fastest growing method of distribution in the world and now you have a ground floor opportunity to grow your business and prosper in the years ahead.

Amway (short for "American Way") is an American multi-level marketing company that sells health, beauty, and home care products. The company was founded in 1959 by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos and is based in Ada, Michigan. Amway and its sister companies under Alticor reported sales of $8.8 billion in 2018. It conducts business through a number of affiliated companies in more than a hundred countries and territories. Amway has been investigated in various countries and by institutions such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for alleged pyramid scheme practices.

founding Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos had been friends since school days and business partners in various endeavors, including a hamburger stand, an air charter service, and a sailing business. In 1949, they were introduced to the Nutrilite Products Corporation by Van Andel's second cousin Neil Maaskant. DeVos and Van Andel signed up to become distributors for Nutrilite food supplements in August. They sold their first box the next day for $19.50, but lost interest for the next two weeks. They traveled to Chicago to attend a Nutrilite seminar soon after, at the urging of Maaskant, who had become their sponsor. They watched promotional filmstrips and listened to talks by company representatives and successful distributors, then they decided to pursue the Nutrilite business. They sold their second box of supplements on their return trip to Michigan, and rapidly proceeded to develop the business further.

Earlier in 1949, DeVos and Van Andel had formed the Ja-Ri Corporation (abbreviated from their respective first names) to import wooden goods from South American countries. After the Chicago seminar, they turned Ja-Ri into a Nutrilite distributorship instead. In addition to profits on each product sold, Nutrilite offered commissions on sales made by new distributors introduced to the company by existing distributors—a system known as multi-level marketing or network marketing. By 1958, DeVos and Van Andel had built an organization of more than 5,000 distributors. However, they and some of their top distributors formed the American Way Association, or Amway, in April 1959 in response to concerns about the stability of Nutrilite and in order to represent the distributors and look for additional products to market.

Their first product was called Frisk, a concentrated organic cleaner developed by a scientist in Ohio. DeVos and Van Andel bought the rights to manufacture and distribute Frisk, and later changed the name to LOC (Liquid Organic Cleaner). They subsequently formed the Amway Sales Corporation to procure and inventory products and to handle sales and marketing plans, and the Amway Services Corporation to handle insurance and other benefits for distributors. In 1960, they purchased a 50% share in Atco Manufacturing Company in Detroit, the original manufacturers of LOC, and changed its name to Amway Manufacturing Corporation. In 1964, the Amway Sales Corporation, Amway Services Corporation, and Amway Manufacturing Corporation merged to form the Amway Corporation.