Gary Vaynerchuk, widely known as GaryVee, is an entrepreneur and marketer who created VeeFriends, a collection of 268 characters he hand-drew as representations of human traits he admires. The collection launched on OpenSea on May 11, 2021 as an initial series of 10,255 tokens, each carrying a three-year ticket to his VeeCon business conference.,
Before turning to NFTs, Vaynerchuk built a career as an entrepreneur and marketer, turning his father's wine shop in New Jersey into the e-commerce business WineLibrary.com and building the digital marketing agency VaynerMedia. He also co-founded the restaurant reservation app Resy, sold to American Express in 2019, and Empathy Wines, sold to Constellation Brands in 2020. He has described VeeFriends as a culmination of his passions for collecting, pop culture and inspirational content, and has said his goal is to build the characters into a franchise on the scale of Hello Kitty, Scooby-Doo, the Smurfs or Despicable Me, complete with toys, children's books and an animated series. Some NFT artists have pushed back on this framing, telling him, in his own account, “That's not art, Gary, you're just trying to trade on your fame”.
Each Series 1 token corresponds to one of the 268 hand-drawn characters, with 1,242 tokens known as G.O.O., for Gary Originally Owned, held back from the original sale for his own collection. In October 2022 VeeFriends brought its characters into physical retail through a partnership with Macy's, selling plush and vinyl versions of characters such as Empathy Elephant and Gratitude Gorilla, each linked by a QR code to a 3D animated film revealing the character's backstory.The brand has also produced collaborations with companies including Reebok, Mattel and Squishmallows.,,
