Sports Card Dealers
From Competitive Clown to Patient Panda, Gary Vee’s VeeFriends cards feature positive messages for kids and adults
Gary Vaynerchuk is a big name in the trading card space.
An entrepreneur, influencer and collector, Gary Vee — as he’s most commonly known — set out to make a personal mark in the industry.
In 2021, he had the idea to create character cards through his VeeFriends company.
“I went off the grind in Malibu for a week,” Vaynerchuk told Sports Collectors Digest at this year’s National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago. “I’d been thinking about it for months. Sat down for a week, and I started to draw. I just got very creative.”
What came out of Vaynerchuk’s solitude retreat were over 250 original characters designed for his Series 1 and 2 trading card products.
“I wanted to create an intellectual property [IP] similar to a Disney or He-Man, a Transformers — really a Sesame Street meets Pokémon,” Vaynerchuk said. “I launched this two years ago, created these characters. Originally, I drew them. I drew them all. Now they’ve been converted into this character form that you see. I created a TCG doing animation and trying to build a really cool non-sports card brand, and I’m really enjoying it.”
Deciding to go with non-sports cards for his creation was a no-brainer for Vaynerchuk.
“I was very affected by Scooby-Doo, by Star Wars. I’m 47 years old. I was into E.T. and the Gremlins and He-Man and Transformers,” Vaynerchuk said. “It’s almost like, how couldn’t I? Plus, I could create this. It’s very hard to go get the rights to the National Football League.”
Every card Vaynerchuk designed conveys a positive message for kids.
“It’s been really fun, especially the message behind it is, come from a good place, but be competitive,” Vaynerchuk said. “You can be a winner, but you can be a nice winner. And so, I think it’s hitting a cord.
“I’m trying to create a world that makes people fall in love with Patient Panda and Accountable Ant the way that they’ve fallen in love with Pikachu or Spider-Man. Through that, trick or inspire people to be more grateful, to be more accountable, to be more kind, but to be more competitive.
“Competitive Clown is a very important character to me. I believe in competition, I don’t believe in eighth-place trophies. On the flipside, Accountable Ant matters to me because I don’t believe in blaming others. You’re a big boy and girl. I would say that’s my mission.”
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Having Vaynerchuk’s name attached to the product played an important role in attracting the attention of collectors.
“But it won’t succeed if I can’t make people fall in love with the characters,” Vaynerchuk said. “These cartoons and these games, it has to transcend me. It gives it a start. … So it’s a high-risk, high-reward endeavor I take very seriously.”
Andy Krainak worked for Vaynerchuk’s personal brand before becoming president of VeeFriends. He says Gary Vee’s immense following has expedited the process.
“Gary’s a serial entrepreneur. People have a lot of respect and admiration,” Krainak said. “His messages and the content that he’s been putting out on his personal brand for the last 10 years … I’ve seen firsthand the impact that it can have on people’s lives. Now to think that he’s trying to scale that through these different characters is really exciting to me.”
GATEWAY TO SPORTS CARDS
Vaynerchuk’s goal in creating the cards is to reach kids and bring them into the hobby he loves.
“I think Pokémon is an incredible gateway to sports cards,” Vaynerchuk said. “I think Pokémon does more good for the sports card industry than they would ever understand. I think VeeFriends will be another one of those IPs.”
Vaynerchuk had a large interactive, family-based booth set up at The National. The space was jam-packed with enthusiastic fans wanting a glimpse of Vaynerchuk and to check out his hit creation.
This colorful, boisterous booth was purposefully designed to get the attention of convention-goers. It worked like a charm.
“I’m a marketer,” Vaynerchuk said. “I’m trying to use my skill sets to make sure people are excited. I want people to fall in love with these characters. I wanted to have a badass booth.”
Not only were kids swarming the booth, adults were just as excited about the products.
“I think adults understand what I’m doing way more than kids,” Vaynerchuk said. “Kids will be naturally attracted, but … adults are kids [too]. Look at us. What the hell’s going on here? Eighty percent of the people [at The National] are adults doing kids things. Adults are kids, my friend.”
What’s the age demo for VeeFriends?
“It’s the whole house,” Krainak said. “I think we have content and messages in characters for every person in the entire family.”
AN INSTANT HIT
VeeFriends collaborated with Fanatics’ new zerocool brand for the Series 1 cards released in March 2022. The zerocool VeeFriends Series 1 product has a base set of 235 cards. Each card had a print run of just 22 copies.
Each Series 1 box contains 10 cards. There was an extremely low print run of just 1,000 boxes. Only 800 of the boxes were made available to the public.
When the VeeFriends cards hit the market, they exploded in popularity and have been in high demand on the secondary market. For the initial sale, the community set the sale price via blind Dutch auction on zerocool at $2,150 per box.
“It’s like our National Treasures,” Krainak said.
By September 2023, some sellers listed the rare boxes on eBay for over five figures. Krainak said there isn’t a lot of sealed product remaining.
“If I guessed, 300 sealed out of 1,000 boxes with two years in,” Krainak said. “I have one personally and I probably won’t open it for another 40 years.”
A professional design team was brought in for Series 2. There were 15 new characters created by Vaynerchuk. In all, there are now 251 characters.
Series 2 has a base set along with numbered cards designated as rare (out of 500), very rare (/100), epic (/25) and spectaculars (1/1). There are also limited Gary Vee autographed cards and original art inserts.
Containing 52 cards (13 packs of four cards), the series was well received by collectors and produced some extremely desirable cards.
“The hottest card is the logo of VeeFriends. It’s included in the logo of VeeFriends, called the Very, Very, Very, Very, Lucky Black Cat,” Krainak said. “Aside from that, you can think about the most common attributes and qualities in your friends and family members that you most admire are probably really hot, tradable VeeFriends characters such as Empathy Elephant or Kind Warrior or Patient Panda.”
The VeeFriends cards blew up in popularity as soon as they were released.
“We have the VeeFriends community, but I’m most excited to expand the IP,” Krainak said. “I think that we’ve had like a really good mix, 50 percent of people that really understand what we’re already about and what we’re doing and want to get a selfie with Gary. Then there’s another 50 percent that are just curious. They might know Gary by name but they’ve never really interacted with us.
“The more they get to see what VeeFriends are like and what our community is like, I think the more excited they are to maybe join us.”
— Greg Bates is a freelance contributor and editor-at-large for Sports Collectors Digest. He can be reached at gregabates@gmail.com.
