From Resy to Empathy Wines, VaynerX chairman Gary “GaryVee” Vaynerchuk knows how to build a profitable business. But up until now, the serial entrepreneur and YouTube star’s work has been based largely on impersonal ideas.
Enter VeeFriends, the business that Vaynerchuk has wanted to own since he was a kid.
On its face, VeeFriends is a brand that aims to “fill a gap in the collectibles” market. Run by Vaynerchuk as founder and CEO, VeeFriends is a storytelling universe that includes more than 280 hand-drawn characters, each designed to teach kindness and life lessons across both younger and older generations.
Influenced by the work of Jim Jenson and Walt Disney described as a cross between Pokémon and “Sesame Street,” Vaynerchuk’s the VeeFriends brand launched in 2021 and now spans comic books, collectibles, content, trading cards and purposeful storytelling.
“From a business standpoint, I think it’s the biggest business I’m building. I believe intellectual property is the winner of the next half century,” Vaynerchuk, who boasts nearly 5 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, tells Variety. “It’s an eight-figure business already in revenue, selling trading cards, coins this year. That’s a meaningful business. I think it could be the biggest business I ever build in my life. Genuinely in my heart, I view it as Disney, Marvel, Pokemon. I’d be surprised if this isn’t where I end up at some point in my career. Meaning, with all my 13 different businesses, if you ask me, you got to pick one — restaurant group, all these alternative sports, the advertising agency is huge, the wine business — if I had to pick a horse where I think I’m riding on just one in my 60s, 70s, 80s, I think it’s VeeFriends.”
At New York Comic Con this week, Vaynerchuk is unveiling the brand’s biggest product expansion yet through digital and physical collectible content, including the reveal of “VeeFriends” issue #22, “Gentle Giant.”
Featuring cover art by Rob Liefeld, “Gentle Giant” is set against the paranoia of the Cold War and tells the story of a secret government experiment to create the ultimate supersoldier using ancient giant DNA. But when the 20-foot-tall creation awakens, his gentle nature clashes with the violent purpose he was built for. Part sci-fi thriller, part Frankenstein story, the issue explores what happens when a living weapon begins to seem more human than the people controlling him.
“Gentle Giant is fighting against this count, Mindful Minakawa, that we set up a couple of episodes of comic books ago and it’s the story of in the 1940s about the U.S. and Japan this is made for 35 to 65 year old history nerds that like characters,” Vaynerchuk says. “That’s fitting good old classic comic book nostalgia: King Kong versus Godzilla, Superman, Cold War-era storytelling. But then Considerate Cowboy is going to come out in the future, and that’s going to be a romance novel. That’s going to be for women. One of the cool things I did, and it was very selfish, but it was also on strategy, is by creating 280-plus characters, I will never run out of time telling my stories.”
As he builds up a transmedia and merch business, Vaynerchuk says isn’t looking for every VeeFriend to be appealing to every demographic — he’s looking to create one VeeFriend that each person can connect with.
“VeeFriends, as a whole, is looking to be [a brand for ages] six to 106. But each individual character and each individual execution may be looking at different demos,” Vaynerchuk says. “I’ll give you an example: when Batman puts out a Lego Batman movie, and it’s clearly made for seven or eight year olds, that’s very different from ‘Dark Knight,’ a feature film that’s rated R. That’s how I think at VeeFriends. I want it to truly be six to 106. All genders, races, income levels, regions in the world. Not everything’s going to be based on just English or Americana. So, it’s an incredibly vast playground of creativity that I’m enjoying.”
Vaynerchuk describes VeeFriends as his greatest passion project — but also the one he thinks will be the most profitable of his ventures in the end, for both “selfish and selfless” reasons, similar to how he approached building his own personal “GaryVee” brand on social media.
“It has the highest financial upside, but it’s selfless because I’m also incredibly driven by making it known because I think I can do good in the world if it’s known and I think it’s very similar to what I ended up doing with GaryVee,” Vaynerchuk says. “I built my personal brand as a business move 15 years ago before people saw it, and it was the most selfish and selfless thing. It’s led to a lot of economic opportunity, but it’s also led to me impacting millions of people in a very positive way. I think there’s just a lot of people out there spewing a lot of hate and negativity and I know that people consume my content for a reprieve from all this darkness.”
There are plans for much more VeeFriends content, though Vaynerchuk is mindful of growing in a way that makes consumers comfortable — and that includes limiting the use of generative AI, for the time being.
“We ourselves have not really fully executed,” Vaynerchuk says, noting that all the VeeFriends characters to date have been created by himself and the VeeFriends team. “A lot of the consumer doesn’t want you to. We more use it for project management and efficiencies more so than the output. But I do predict very easily that the stigma will go away within the next decade, and we’ll be prepared to make content at scale with it once we think the world would appreciate it.”
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