Jay Van Andel, (June 3, 1924 - December 7, 2004) was an American businessman best-known as co-founder of the Amway Corporation; he was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
He was also known for funding[1] religious missions and conservative political causes, including the Republican Party. Shortly before his death from Parkinson's Disease-related complications on 4 December 2004, aged 80, Forbes Magazine estimated his net worth at $2.3 billion, making him the world's 231st richest individual.
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Military career
After high school, he entered Calvin College. While in college, a recruiter persuaded him to enlist. He enlisted in 1942 in the United States Army Air Corps as a private and came out four years later as a first lieutenant.[2]
Amway
Van Andel co-founded Amway with Rich DeVos in 1959. This was not their first joint venture; DeVos had been a high-school classmate of Van Andel's, and the two had worked together in several business ventures in the twenty years prior to the founding of Amway. These included a flying school, a drive-in restaurant (the first in Grand Rapids), and the Ja-Ri Corporation, which sold vitamins and food supplements from the Nutrilite company. With Ja-Ri they experimented with multi-level marketing, a way of building sales distribution networks based on individuals' personal contacts, and subsequently applied the same principle to Amway. Amway began as a family business, operating out of the basements of their neighborhood homes, and initially sold only one product, a biodegradable household cleaner.
The company has since grown to 13,000 employees and several million distributors in more than 90 countries. Its parent company, Alticor, has worldwide sales of $8.2 billion by 2008 with China being its largest market.
After accusations that Amway was an illegal pyramid scheme, the Federal Trade Commission in 1979 ruled after a six-year investigation that it was not. It did, however, order Amway to stop retail price fixing and allocating customers among distributors and prohibited the company from misrepresenting the amount of profit, earnings or sales its distributors are likely to achieve with the business. Amway was ordered to accompany any such statements with the actual averages per distributor, pointing out that more than half of the distributors do not make any money, with the average distributor making less than $100 per month. The order was violated with a 1986 ad campaign, resulting in a $100,000 fine.[3]
Van Andel was succeeded as Chairman of Amway by his son, Steve, in 1995. His lifelong business partner, Rich DeVos, had already handed over the Presidency of Amway to his son Dick in 1992. The founders' sons shared the newly created office of Chief Executive of Amway.
Conservative contributor
From 1985, Van Andel was a member of the Heritage Foundation, and was at the time of his death a trustee of the traditionally conservative Hillsdale College. A strong supporter of the Republican Party, Van Andel contributed $2 million to the re-election campaign of President George W. Bush, and $475,000 to the Michigan State Republican Party (mostly for state legislature candidates) in 2004 alone. He was noted for his friendship with former President Gerald Ford, who lamented his passing and called him "a great family man and a worldwide leader in the business arena". Steve Forbes wrote about Jay, "Whether in business or philantropy, Van Andel understood that the primary goal was to serve the needs and wants of other people. He exmplified the best of America." [4] Van Andel had served as a director of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation.
In addition to Amway, Van Andel pursued many other business ventures throughout his life. He served as chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He was particularly interested in leaving his mark on the city of Grand Rapids, and his name appears on landmarks throughout the city. After purchasing the 65-year-old Pantlind Hotel in 1978, he and DeVos had it rebuilt with a 29-story tower and reopened as the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel.
He donated substantial funds to build the Van Andel Museum Center to house the Grand Rapids Public Museum in 1994. He donated $11.5 million towards the $75 million cost of Van Andel Arena downtown. Since he and his wife suffered from serious medical problems later in life, he established the Van Andel Institute (devoted to medical research and education), building its headquarters in Grand Rapids at a cost of $60 million, and pledging $2 billion, which was most of his personal estate, to medical research.
His wife, Betty Van Andel, preceded him in death on 18 January 2004, at the age of 82. A sufferer of Alzheimer's Disease, she died at their Peter Island home in the Caribbean.
A member of the Christian Reformed Church, Van Andel had a life-long interest in Christian causes, and funded many religious ventures, including the construction of the Van Andel Creation Research Center in Chino Valley, Arizona operated by the Creation Research Society.[5]
He summed up his business philosophy in his autobiography An Enterprising Life, in these words: "For me, the greatest pleasure comes not from the endless acquisition of material things, but from creating wealth and giving it away."
Mr. Van Andel was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1998.
References
- ^ Mediamouse.org article
- ^ The Possible Dream, page 47, by Charles Paul Conn
- ^ Amway Corp. To Pay $100,000 Civil Penalty, Settling FTC Charges
- ^ http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0214/025_print.html Forbes, 02/14/05
- ^ Van Andel Creation Research Center, CRS
- This article contains content from HierarchyPedia article Jay Van Andel, used here under the GNU Free Documentation License.
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