Amway opens $2.5M business center in L.A. after success in New York

ADA, MI — In recent years, Amway has been opening dozens of brick-and-mortar locations around the globe.

The pace has been slower in the company’s North America market. Amway recently opened a location in the Los Angeles area, four years after trying the concept out in New York.

Depending on its success, more could be added in major U.S. cities.

“We will be looking at if we do another one, what is the next, most logical place for us to go,” said Jim Ayres, Amway North America’s managing director. “I would suspect though in the coming years, we will do at least a few more of these in major cities around the United States and Canada.”

He added that Amway will take a measured approach to opening more locations because they require a large capital expense.

Described as a business center, Amway recently spent $2.5 million on the 8,000 square-foot space in Southern California. It includes a retail component where Amway products such as Nutrilite supplements and Artistry cosmetics are sold.

“We do have a really, really nice store location there,” said Ayres. “It doesn’t have all our products but it does have a selection of our most popular products and different brands we have at Amway.”

The space isn’t a traditional storefront. Instead, it’s geared primarily for Amway’s distributors —  who are called Independent Business Owners or IBOs – to bring their prospects to learn more about the company’s direct selling model.

The newest facility is in Buena Park, about 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles — on the company’s Nutrilite campus.

Amway picked New York and the Los Angeles area for the first U.S. business centers because those markets comprised a “pretty big share of our business in North America,” Ayres said.

The newest facility, which opened April 18, is expected to draw distributors from across the West Coast region.

The New York City location in Citi Field, the home of the New York Mets stadium, has done well since opening in 2013 as a pilot. It relaunched in October 2015 after a major renovation which added retail space for Amway products.

More than 500 distributors and their prospects walk through the doors daily. The center sells nearly $70,000 in products a day, according to Menaka Abel, manager of sales operations, for Amway North America.

“We are very focused on the product training that comes out of these centers, and in differentiating why the Amway product line is better and giving them the tools to be able to sell those products,” she said.

In other countries, the business centers are part of the supply chain and distribution model. That isn’t the case in North America where most products are ordered online, and delivered by either the U.S. Postal Service or FedEx.

Amway sees the potential for the L.A. area location to surpass the New York center’s success

“The business performance metrics we look at in New York compared to the rest of the United States, for instance, is significantly better,” Ayres said. “The Amway business owners in the area that use the facility are getting real results from it.”