We welcomed more than 200 Founders Council members and other attendees to our World Headquarters this week, and we did it in grand style. Check out some of the photos on our Amway Facebook page. And if you missed the live stream of their arrival courtesy of our Amacam, the replay is available here. Watch for more coverage in the weeks to come!

The 2013 Founders Council began today in Grand Rapids, Michigan! Tomorrow we welcome them to our World Headquarters. Here are some fun facts. Did you know…

We are preparing to welcome about 200 members of our 2013 Founders Council to West Michigan next week, and for the first time ever you are invited to watch part of the festivities.

We will present a live broadcast of their arrival at our World Headquarters in Ada, Michigan. The one and a half hour live-stream will air on May 14th at 2:00 p.m. EDT via a special tab on Amway Corporate Facebook page.

Thanks to new technology – our Amacam – we are able to share all the glamour and excitement of the event with Amway distributors, prospects and friends around the globe.

The Amacam consists of three high-definition cameras (two inside and one outside) that will showcase the members as they arrive to walk the yellow carpet and be welcomed by hundreds of Amway employees.

Attendees to this year’s Founders Council group come from 15 different countries and include 11 new Founders Council members!

So, mark your calendar and plan to join us for the celebration. (How many of our top distributors will you be able to identify?)

Post by Gary Wade.

With more than 900 research and development professionals employed by Amway, discovery is job #1.

In fact, more than 1,000 patents have been secured during the company’s history and over 800 more are pending. Many of these discoveries are driven by customer demands, feedback from distributors or advances in the market.

But some of the best discoveries happen simply by accident.

Take, for example, the company’s invention of non-chlorinated automatic dishwasher detergent. In the 1980s, there was not a non-chlorinated product on the market and Amway wasn’t trying to develop one. But, while testing a potential product for soil removal, our R&D professionals noticed that the product eliminated spots. Upon further testing, it also seemed to clean plates, plastic and other flatware better than anything else.

Quickly, a new product was born.

“It was all just serendipity,” Amway Scientist Ernie Brumbaugh said. “The result of observation and the understanding that something unique was happening in front of our eyes.”

What came to be known as Crystal Bright Automatic Dishwashing Detergent is just one of many discoveries made by Brumbaugh, who’s been with Amway for nearly 43 years.  It’s also one of the reasons the company recently honored him with induction into the Amway’s new R&D Distinguished Scientific Leadership Society – the highest honor bestowed by the R&D division.

Our Amway One by One Campaign for Children had quite a week last week.

Amway staff attended the International Corporate Citizenship Conference, organized by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship.

Our own Jesse Hertstein was one of the speakers, explaining how our campaign is organized globally, but is implemented with flexibility among the local country affiliates.

We also were honored with an award: Our film highlighting 10 years of our One by One Campaign was named one of the 10 finalists in a film festival sponsored by Boston College.

Many thanks to all who voted for it. That film has now been viewed more than 10,000 times. Thank you to everyone for helping us share our story!

We are pleased to report that the major facilities at our World Headquarters did not experience any damage as a result of the record-breaking flood waters moving through West Michigan.

We are open for business thanks, in large part, to protective measures taken during our three-day closure. Teams filled 30,000 sandbags for use on our campus and around the neighboring village of Ada. Also, 86 concrete berms weighing 11,000 pounds each were used to build a flood wall.

Thank you to everyone who worked throughout the weekend to keep our complex safe.

Check out these aerial photos taken this weekend of the Village of Ada and our campus. You can also click here for news about the rising waters at our facilities, including more aerial photos showing the campus before and during the rising waters.

Our World Headquarters will be closed Monday, April 22, as we fend off the rising waters of the Grand River bordering our property.

Many parts of our community are flooded as river levels rise to heights not seen in more than a century.

Our thoughts and prayers are with all those who are affected, and we hope everyone stays safe.

“Amway was founded on the belief that, by helping people improve their lives, they could make the world a better place.”

So begins the message from our Chairman Steve Van Andel and our President Doug DeVos in the Amway 2012 Global Corporate Social Responsibility Report released today.

The annual report highlights the many ways our company, its more than 21,000 employees and more than 3 million distributors make a difference in the lives of others.

That includes building homes in Latin America, providing water filters in Haiti, building libraries in China and adopting schools right here in the hometown of our World Headquarters.

Corporate Social Responsibility is built into everything we do: our people, our products and our performance.

 Steve and Doug credit their fathers for recognizing the potential in this business for making a difference.

“They made it their mission to be more, do more, give more. And more than a half-century later, we’re still emulating their powerful example. … We’re awed by how far we’ve come and inspired to keep becoming more, together.”

Read the full report here.

When cofounders Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos started Amway in 1959, they did not stop with their initial product offering or American footprint. They kept growing by asking themselves, “What if…?”

That same question is still asked each day by our Business Innovations team. Glenn Armstrong, head of the team, talks about it in this video, the first of several we will be posting.

“If you continue to ask yourself, ‘What if?’ it gets you thinking about the possibilities,” Armstrong said. ”What if we had this many distributors? What if Amway supplied these types of products?

“If you ask yourself, ‘What if?’ you find yourself getting used to being outside your comfort zone.”

vimeo Direkt

Would you like to own a piece of a Nutrilite Farm? Why stop there — how about a Nutrilite Lab? Amway Korea  has made it possible.

The more than 5 million users of a popular mobile game called Rule the Sky can purchase Nutrilite farms or crops, build Nutrilite structures and visit other users’ islands. It’s similar to Farmville, but in Rule the Sky users are on their own floating island in the sky called Flotia.

The marketing effort is called “advergaming,” and it’s not just a cool buzz word. When done correctly it can be a successful tactic with an immersive effect on players. Of the more than 5 million users of Rule the Sky, an average of 800,000 of them play 45-60 minutes more than once a day.

Rather than being exposed to a 30-second ad, a gamer’s attention is captured in a much more significant way. Advergaming also offers an additional measuring stick in the form of downloads: Nutrilite’s laboratory has been downloaded nearly 330,000 times. And Nutrilite’s El Petacal farm in Mexico? That’s been downloaded nearly 790,000 times.

So start tilling the virtual soil and rule the sky with your Nutrilite Farm!