The History of Amway – Quixtar Business Support Materials

Posted on 03. Sep, 2006 by Ty Tribble in Quixtar

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Beth Dornan, an emloyee of Quixtar offers the first public Amway - Quixtar corporate explanation (to my knowledge) of the tools business:

You may not know this, but Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel created the first business support materials (BSM).

When Amway’s co-founders started the company, they personally sponsored and trained many then-distributors. They held meetings, they gave speeches, they did product demos and they taught others to do the same.

Soon, they couldn’t be everywhere they wanted to be. So they got a mimeograph machine and started doing print communications that were mailed to distributors to help spread information and share ideas. Jay Van Andel’s old typewriter used to be in the old company Visitor Center.

Those of you old enough to remember when schools had mimeographs rather than copiers can probably practically smell the ink and see the blue smudges on your fingers.

But as the business grew and “company business” demanded more of their time and energy, Rich and Jay simply couldn’t do it all. Distributors who had established themselves as leaders began holding meetings and creating communications. So there was a stream of information coming both from the company and from distributor leaders. You’ll note that I’m going to use the term "distributor" in a historical sense, since the term Independent Business Owner (or IBO) didn’t exist until just before Quixtar’s launch in 1999.

While many leaders began to charge to cover costs, some realized that they could be compensated for sharing their business-building ideas and insights – not unlike other motivational and business consultants.

Which led to a couple of widely reported and speculated upon communications from the company in the early 1980s.

The reality is that Amway Corp. did become concerned when books, tapes, and meetings became significant businesses for some distributor leaders...