What could inspire a direct selling veteran to build another company from the ground up after he’s achieved incredible success over three decades as an entrepreneur, author and speaker? Armand Puyolt will tell you in one word: Love. Vida Divina, the latest chapter in this industry leader’s story, is a health and wellness powerhouse that’s sharing love through its people, its products and its possibilities.
Armand Puyolt shouldn’t still be here. In 2010, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of gastric cancer and given six months to live—a tragic ending to a vibrant and successful life for one of the industry’s most celebrated leaders.
“I was a single father at the time,” he explained. “I knew I didn’t want to take chemo or radiation. All I wanted to do was build a residual for my kids.”
He accepted the diagnosis and went to work building a company with a partner, but he had someone else by his side who refused to believe that his life would be measured in months. Esther Ramos, an herbalist from Mexico who would go on to become his wife, immediately went to work on a combination of herbs that she believed could change Armand’s outcome. Her love and insistence that he infuse his diet with these herbs would save his life.
“She went with me everywhere, giving me a spoonful every so often,” he shared. “Six months went by; seven months went by; eight months went by. And I just kept feeling better, but I never had the courage to go back to the doctor. I went back in 2015, almost five years later and the very first thing the doctor told me when he looked at my file was, ‘This is not you. I think there was an error, a mistake.’ It felt like I’d been given a brand new life.”
With this second chance, Armand knew he couldn’t continue with the company he’d been building with a partner—he had to build something new focused on the herbs and plants that he believed had saved his life. Together, he and Esther founded Vida Divina.
With a manufacturing facility in place and deep relationships throughout the direct selling industry, Armand and Esther launched the company in September 2016. When 43,000 people signed up in the company’s first weekend, the couple was both elated and scared.
“I was kind of scared because we had produced product for 10,000 people,” Armand said. “We weren’t expecting that many people coming into the company! By the next Friday we had around 68,000 people in the system. And then by the end of the year—which was only a few months later—we had over a hundred thousand people. We just kept growing, and we’ve had some difficulties, obviously because of the growth. We grew from a massive 50,000 square foot facility to a 10-acre facility that we just moved into”
Today, Vida Divina is home to over 800,000 consultants across 58 countries and 13 facilities, sharing the company’s line of over 90 products. And they are still growing; within the last six months, Vida Divina has acquired Mialé, an MLM from Peru, and Radien Brand, which is backed by hundreds of patents and thousands of medical studies. Esther’s original herbal formula became TeDivina®, a detox tea comprised of twelve herbs that served as the company’s flagship product. Vida Divina’s product line has since expanded to include teas, coffees, extracts, shakes, supplements and skincare. The same herbal ingredients that Esther used to rewrite Armand’s story are foundational to the product line.
“It’s everything that we used and everything that now I believe in,” Armand shared. “I one hundred percent believe in all these herbal products because I saw with my own eyes what it did for me.”
Grounded in Love
Love comes in many forms at Vida Divina. While Armand and Esther’s story is a piece of the company’s history, a different kind of love drives Vida Divina’s success.
“Lead with love, that’s our motto,” Armand shared. “We use the hashtag ‘lead with love’ everywhere, in everything that we do. You’ll see it in our corporate offices. You’ll see it everywhere else around. And what it means to me is that you help people so they can grow, so you can grow. I came from a single mom home and everywhere we went, we didn’t have enough to eat. So, one of the things that I ask is, ‘how can we help people?’ That’s our mission: How can we help the single mom? How can we help the family that doesn’t have enough to eat?”
This key question—how can we help people—has led the Vida Divina sales field to function as one team. There are no individual teams in the field, as they’re not permitted. Instead, every distributor is part of the larger family, helping one another and sharing resources and ideas.
“We create a structure where people basically are in love with what we do,” Armand added. “It’s about helping people more than everything else. Will there be millionaires? Definitely. I think we’ve created more Latin American millionaires in the last few years than any other company.”
Vida Divina is based in the United States but has chosen to prioritize the Spanish-speaking world—both here and abroad—in both customer and field communications. Over 80 percent of the company’s sales are within the United States, and most of the field is here too, but Vida Divina is specifically catering to the Spanish-speaking market.
“We’ve grown the English-speaking market, but the Spanish-speaking market has grown tremendously faster for us,” Armand explained. “We do everything in Spanish at our events, instead of the other way around. Our first top earners were all in the English market, and our first few conventions were all in English. But the people who stuck with us were in the Latin community. In the last three years, we converted to a Spanish-only convention. We do a regional event in English, but a giant convention in Spanish. I think it’s drawn more people because they feel at home. They feel like they’re important instead of feeling second rate anywhere else.”
Empowered by Love
Like many companies, Vida Divina experienced tremendous growth during the pandemic, in both sales and new consultants joining the field. The field growth in the Hispanic market was astronomical.
“During COVID, we quadrupled in size with the Hispanic market,” he shared. “When they closed restaurants, the busboys were the ones who had three jobs. The waiters were looking for a job. Everybody was looking for something. We were the one that everybody pointed at.”
Armand believes that the opportunity for Vida Divina to continue to impact the Hispanic market is only going to grow, and he encourages more leaders to actively pursue and serve this community, too.
“When people are looking at the growth of Vida Divina, especially within the Latin community—we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people—I want people and other company owners to understand that they can create that too,” Armand said. “They have to show that love to people. They have to be on the ground. Your corporate team has to show up to these countries because it’s very difficult when you’re trying to grow a company in Mexico, but the CEO doesn’t want to step into that country. Or you want to try to grow your company into Peru, but your corporate staff has fear of going to Latin America. It’s important that people know that you care so much that you’re there; you care so much that you show up.”
With economic uncertainty looming on the horizon, Armand knows that direct selling will continue to be a powerful tool of hope and love in this community and beyond.
“The economy is going to drop,” he said. “I’m excited about that. And people go, how can you be excited? Because if COVID showed me something it was that when the economy is going to drop, our growth is going to expand. So I’m excited about everything that’s coming up. I’m excited about getting up every morning and breathing. Because I know I shouldn’t be here, but because I’m here, it’s a gift every single day. And to me, that is the meaning that I need everybody to understand within our company and outside our company. You’re up and you got the opportunity to live today, take advantage as much as possible. That’s what we do.”
From the March 2024 issue of Direct Selling News magazine.
