Why DeVos and Van Andel are on so many Grand Rapids landmarks

Spend a day in Grand Rapids and two last names keep turning up: DeVos and Van Andel. There is Van Andel Arena, DeVos Place, Van Andel Institute, Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, and more. Those names do not come from one sponsorship deal. They trace back to two local friends, the company they built, and several different gifts and institutions that followed.

Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel met in high school in Grand Rapids. In 1959, after trying several businesses together, they founded Amway from the basements of their homes in Ada. The company still has its world headquarters there. It sells household, beauty, and nutrition products through independent business owners instead of a conventional chain of stores.

That sales system has drawn plenty of argument, so the 1979 Federal Trade Commission decision is worth stating carefully. The commission did not find Amway’s sales plan to be an illegal pyramid scheme. It did find unlawful resale-price controls and false or misleading earnings claims, and it ordered the company to stop those practices. In other words, the ruling was neither “Amway was a pyramid” nor “the FTC said everything was fine.”

The landmark names came later and in different ways. Van Andel Arena says it was named for its largest benefactors, Jay and Betty Van Andel. The couple founded Van Andel Institute in 1996 for biomedical research and science education. Amway’s founder history credits Rich and Helen DeVos with helping create DeVos Place, Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, and Grand Valley State University’s DeVos campus. That is the plain answer to the name puzzle: wealth from an Ada company helped build several Grand Rapids institutions, and those institutions carry the names of the people who backed or founded them.