Network marketing has been around for many years now, before it proved to be a successful model to be emulated by many firms trying to make it big in the market. It was in the early 1940's that California Vitamins, a sales oriented organisation, found out a way of increasing sales using a lot of sales executives, rather than the conventional model of making a few sales representatives sell volumes of products. Further, the company also made a discovery of who their client base were - who happened to be the friends, families and among the circle of associates of their sales executives. The client base had grown since the sales representatives had been happy with the products and had referred the products to their near and dear.

This led to the idea of developing further sales representatives out of their own customer base and paying a referral fees or a commission to the customers for taking the products to new places and prospects, And when the sales of the organisation started picking up pace, individual sales representatives as well as teams formed by the referrals were rewarded for their efforts. And with the new discovery came a new form of the organisation, which morphed into Nutrilite Food Supplement Corporation, which is considered the pioneer in the concept of network marketing.

Another marketing giant was born a few years later, in 1959, which came to signify the 'American Way' of going about their business - and it was named Amway. Established by Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel in 1959, Amway started off in the same network marketing concept and has successfully formed an extensive network of operating in more than 80 countries, widely represented by people of all walks of life and formed by customers who were rewarded for their efforts in referring Amway products to increase sales and distribution. Their network base runs into the millions around the world.

An industry that was started off with these two organisations is now worth over a hundred billion dollars in revenue and is growing at phenomenal rates, with such high scope for growth and expansion left in the industry. The success of the two pioneering organisations, coupled with the popularity of the networking marketing concept among a huge proportion of population, with a growing presence and dominance in the global markets, has made the industry evolve further, and use technology and the power of internet to go to even greater heights and achieve consistence in growth with time.