From co-founding the restaurant reservation platform Resy to launching Empathy Wines, serial entrepreneur and VaynerX chairman Gary “GaryVee” Vaynerchuk has long established himself as a master of building profitable businesses. Yet, up until recently, much of the YouTube star and media personality’s commercial work has been rooted in largely impersonal ideas—logistics, hospitality, advertising, and digital infrastructure.
That trajectory shifted fundamentally with the creation of VeeFriends, an enterprise that Vaynerchuk has wanted to build since his childhood days of trading baseball cards and comic books.
On its surface, VeeFriends is a modern lifestyle and entertainment brand engineered to fill a distinct gap in the contemporary collectibles market. Operating with Vaynerchuk at the helm as founder and CEO, VeeFriends functions as an expansive storytelling universe encompassing more than 280 hand-drawn characters. Each creation is intentionally designed to impart lessons on kindness, empathy, and foundational life principles intended to resonate across both younger and older generations.
Drawn from Vaynerchuk’s childhood influences and inspired by the creative legacies of visionaries like Jim Henson and Walt Disney, the property has frequently been described by observers as a stylistic cross between Pokémon and “Sesame Street.” Since officially launching in 2021, VeeFriends has rapidly evolved into a multifaceted media brand. Today, its footprint spans comic books, physical and digital collectibles, original content, trading cards, and purposeful narrative storytelling designed to engage an audience spanning multiple generations.
The Crown Jewel of a Business Empire
Speaking with Variety, Vaynerchuk did not hesitate to emphasize the long-term significance of his latest venture within his broader business portfolio, which includes a massive advertising agency, alternative sports investments, and wine enterprises.
“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 primary 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.”
This vision took center stage at New York Comic Con, where Vaynerchuk and his team unveiled the brand’s most ambitious product expansion to date. The showcase included a wave of new digital and physical collectible content, anchored heavily by the official reveal of “VeeFriends” issue #22, titled “Gentle Giant.”
Featuring striking cover art by legendary comic book artist Rob Liefeld, “Gentle Giant” draws inspiration from the lingering paranoia of the Cold War era. The narrative centers on a clandestine government experiment designed to engineer the ultimate supersoldier utilizing ancient giant DNA. However, complications arise when the towering, 20-foot-tall creation awakens, and his inherent gentle nature comes into direct conflict with the violent, tactical purpose for which he was manufactured. Blending elements of a classic sci-fi thriller with the timeless tragedy of a Frankenstein story, the comic explores complex themes surrounding what happens when a living weapon begins to display more humanity than the human controllers orchestrating his existence.
“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 explains, detailing the cross-demographic appeal of the narrative. “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.”
A Transmedia Playground for All Ages
As he continues to scale the transmedia universe and merchandise operations behind VeeFriends, Vaynerchuk maintains that the strategy does not rely on making every single character universally appealing to every demographic. Instead, the objective is far more targeted: cultivating a diverse roster so that every individual consumer can find at least one specific character they can genuinely connect with on a personal level.
“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 notes. “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 frequently characterizes VeeFriends as his ultimate passion project, yet one that carries the highest potential for long-term profitability across all his commercial endeavors. He views the venture through a lens that balances both financial upside and cultural impact, drawing direct parallels to how he approached the construction of his ubiquitous “GaryVee” personal brand across social media over the past decade and a half.
“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.”
Navigating the Future of Content and Technology
Looking ahead, the roadmap for VeeFriends includes a steady stream of content expansions, comic book releases, and product rollouts. At the same time, Vaynerchuk remains keenly aware of consumer sentiment regarding the pace and methods of production, particularly when it comes to emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence. For the moment, the company is exercising caution regarding the integration of AI tools into its creative output.
“We ourselves have not really fully executed,” Vaynerchuk says, pointing out that every single character within the VeeFriends universe to date has been conceived and drawn by himself and his dedicated internal 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.”
