From Resy to Empathy Wines, VaynerX president Gary “GaryVee” Vaynerchuk knows how to build a profitable business. But until now, the serial entrepreneur and YouTube star’s work has largely relied on impersonal ideas.
Enter VeeFriends, the company Vaynerchuk has wanted to own since he was a kid.
On the surface, VeeFriends is a brand that aims to “fill a gap in the collectibles market.” VeeFriends, led by Vaynerchuk as founder and CEO, is a storytelling universe featuring more than 280 hand-drawn characters, each designed to impart kindness and life lessons to generations young and old.
Influenced by the work of Jim Henson and Walt Disney, described as a cross between Pokémon and “Sesame Street,” Vaynerchuk’s VeeFriends brand launched in 2021 and now spans comics, collectibles, content, trading cards and purposeful storytelling.
“From a business perspective, I think this is the biggest business I’ve ever built. I believe the winner of the next half century is intellectual property,” says Vaynerchuk, whose YouTube channel boasts nearly 5 million subscribers. Diversity. “A business selling trading cards and coins that’s already in eight figures this year in revenue. It’s a meaningful business. I think it could be the biggest business I’ve ever built in my life. I really see it as Disney, Marvel, Pokemon. I’d be surprised if that’s not where I end up at some point in my career. I mean, if you ask me, you’ve got to pick one of my 13 different jobs – the restaurant group, all these alternative sports, the ad agency is huge, the wine business – just one ancestor in my 60s, 70s, 80s.” If I had to pick one horse I thought I rode, I think it would be VeeFriends.
This week at New York Comic Con, Vaynerchuk is unveiling the brand’s largest product expansion to date through digital and physical collectible content, including “Gentle Giant,” issue 22 of “VeeFriends.”
“The Gentle Giant,” with cover art by Rob Liefeld, deals with the paranoia of the Cold War and tells the story of a secret government experiment to create the ultimate super soldier using ancient giant DNA. But when the 20-foot creature awakens, his gentle nature clashes with the violent purpose for which he was built. Part sci-fi thriller, part Frankenstein story, this issue explores what happens when a living weapon starts to look more human than the people controlling it.
“The Gentle Giant takes on the Mindful Minakawa count we did a comic a few episodes ago, and it’s the story about the United States and Japan in the 1940s, made for 35- to 65-year-old history buffs who love the characters,” Vaynerchuk says. “It fits very well with the good old classic comic book nostalgia: King Kong vs. Godzilla, Superman, Cold War-era storytelling. But in the future, The Pensive Cowboy will come out, and it’ll be a romance. It’ll be for women. One of the great things I did, and it was very selfish, but it was also about strategy, creating over 280 characters, I’ll never run out of time to tell my stories.”
Vaynerchuk says that when building a transmedia and product business, he wasn’t looking for every VeeFriend to appeal to every demographic, he was looking to create a VeeFriend that every person could connect with.
“VeeFriends as a whole [a brand for ages] From 6 to 106. But each character and each app may be looking at different demos,” Vaynerchuk says. “I’ll give you an example: When Batman releases a Lego Batman movie, and it’s clearly made for seven- or eight-year-olds, that’s very different from ‘Dark Knight,’ which is a feature film rated R. That’s what I think at VeeFriends. I really want it to be from 6 to 106. All genders, races, income levels, regions in the world. Not everything will be based solely on English or America. So it’s an incredibly broad playing field of creativity that I enjoy.”
Vaynerchuk describes VeeFriends as his biggest passion project — but also the one he thinks will ultimately be the most profitable of his ventures, for reasons that are both “selfish and altruistic,” similar to how he approached building his own personal “GaryVee” brand on social media.
“It has the ultimate financial upside, but it’s selfless because I’m also incredibly passionate about getting the word out because I think I can do good in the world if it’s known, and I think that’s very similar to what I’m doing with GaryVee,” Vaynerchuk says. “I built my personal brand as a business move 15 years ago, before people saw it, and it was a very selfish and selfless thing to do. It’s led to a lot of economic opportunity, but it’s also led me to impact millions of people in a very positive way. I think there’s a lot of people out there spreading a lot of hate and negativity, and I know people are consuming my content to escape all that darkness.”
There are plans for much more VeeFriends content, but Vaynerchuk is careful to expand in a way that keeps consumers comfortable, and that includes limiting the use of productive AI for now.
“We didn’t actually bring it to life,” says Vaynerchuk, noting that all VeeFriends characters to date were created by him and the VeeFriends team. “The majority of consumers don’t want you to do this. We use it more for project management and efficiency than for output. But I very easily predict over the next decade that stigma will fade, and once we think the world will appreciate it, we’ll be ready to create content with it at scale.”