Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio right now. I am supremely honored, or should I say very lucky to be sitting down with a legend, Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as Gary Vee. Gary, it's so great to see you. Thank you for having me. That was very kind. We're here at Expo West. Yes. Your booth is mobbed.
Yes. You have been talking to people left and right, which is awesome. I mean, this is kind of your thing. I mean, you love talking to people. My stick, I do like people, but we're here today to talk about Very Luckee. Yes. Which is your new brand of Better for You gummies. Yes. So how long has this been in development?
You know, I mean, I started a wine brand seven, eight years ago called Empathy Wines. Mm-hmm. With, uh, two partners who were former interns of my, uh, agency, CPG VaynerMedia, started to start brands like this. Yep. So, in some ways it's been in the works for 15 years. On the other side Vee Friends, my little world of characters, my Pokemon, my Marvel.
When I started it five years ago, I wanted to have a General Mills like DNA to it, you know, count, you know, like, uh, you know, count CHOA and Yeah. And Flintstone's Vitamins. I envisioned a world where my characters would be in the front facing of my CPG products. Also, five, six years ago, my wife Mona, who is my partner in this, has, has been like.
Really pushing for the fact that there needs to be even cleaner products in the marketplace. That she was thrilled that there was healthy products going on, but every one of them had one or two or three ingredients that weren't clean enough. So all three of those energies over the last 15 years combined in, in Very Luckee Vee Friends was getting big enough where we could make an.
Bat, take a swing at something in CPG. My thesis of collectability, the fact that these come with a collectible sticker pack collectability interjecting into CPG was also growing as a business thesis. So all of those ingredients led to this meal. So about 15 months ago, I said, you know what? It's time.
Let's make a better for you fruit snack gummies. Let's put a collectible sticker in it. Uh, let's use our most important character in Befriend is called very, very, very, Very Luckee Black Cat. So that's where the name comes from. Gary B is one of the big characters in Befriend, so he shows up here. We've got the stickers inside, but most of all, what is blown away, all the buyers and doctors that have stopped by is how clean the product is.
And that goes to Dr. Mona Vaynerchuk. She's the, uh, pusher there. You know, getting into CPG is tough. Yes. Getting into kids products Yes. Is even tougher because at the end of the day, you're really selling to the parents, right? Yes. How do you effectively sell to both the parents and the kids who are eventually going to eat these products?
Marketing, which is the one thing I'm most confident about, it's what I've done my whole life and contemporary marketing, is live shopping. It's GEO and a EO search result optimization, which means showing up first. If somebody said, what's the cleanest snack? For my kids on chat, GBT or claw like showing up.
So we'll be good at that. Live shopping. It is just something we're incredibly strong at. Mm-hmm. So I anticipate selling this on TikTok shop, on whatnot, on eBay. Live in a very aggressive way. 'cause don't forget it's a collectible, not just a CPG. Mm-hmm. Very unique to what we're doing. I think in three years here you'll walk around and be like, wow.
Gary was really right about that. Collectible injection into CPG. Um, word of mouth Influencer marketing again, I'm gonna say it nice and slow and I, I'm saying this 'cause I'm bragging on my wife. This is the cleanest fruit snack in the market. Like I'm telling you, the nerdiest nerd people that are walking around here, the far, far, far extreme health crew that is walking by is completely blown away by the ingredients.
So I actually anticipate 15 to 30 hardcore clean advocates. To realize this exists and create content that will be very influential. 'cause there is no competitive product yet, and I hope there'll be many by the way. I want the world to be healthier. Yeah. So I think we have a very strong go to market plan on why this can be differentiated and ga and gain some heat.
Social marketing can be expensive. Yes. Sometimes it can be effective just having, uh, influencers and folks who are just well versed. In that type of platforms and those type of platforms, but how are you going to approach social media in a way that is cost effective for Very Luckee? I say this with as much hu I, I hope everyone doesn't get upset with me here, but I'm gonna go as humble as I can on this.
I believe that many people would say that I am the godfather of this game. Sure. How am I, I'm gonna do it 'cause I'm good at it. I know the thumbnails, I know the first three seconds. I know the algorithms. I know what's going on in popular culture. I know the difference between a LinkedIn video and a regular post.
I know what's going on on Substack. I know exactly how to create content for Snapchat. Spotlight a place. No one's paying attention to Facebook. Classic Blue is huge for this 'cause of the moms I'm looking at. I have an agency with 3000 people that is spending billions of dollars in media and hundreds of millions of dollars in content creation of how to get organic views in that platform.
That would be like asking LeBron James, like, how's he gonna do in this new version of a basketball game? This is my great comfort zone. I'm very confident in it. And, um, it's, it's disproportionately our biggest strength as an organization and organizations, and. You know, in the same way I built up empathy wines that had a substantial exit to Constellation.
We're not looking to exit this brand. We're looking for this to be a brand builder for the overall V Friends universe. Mm-hmm. Um, but I feel very confident in our ability to make day-to-day organic social content over index organically in views, and then know what to do with paid. Or with campaign. On top of that framework, I ask because a lot of our listeners are going to be saying, Hey, you know, this is awesome that Gary's getting into this game, but they wanna learn about how you're going about, I'm gonna introducing the brand.
I try Yeah. And I, and I did it a little bit there and now I thank you for the follow up. Lemme go even deeper, friends. The mid funnel organic social is the whole game right now. Creating more content organically and social, and then responding to the content that gets used either in a performance paid environment or as a springboard to an experiential execution, uh, to A TVC, to if you've got dollars running Amazon Prime video ads from the creative you want using, using organic social as the starting point, but being on every platform, YouTube shorts for GEO and a EO to show up on Gemini.
Uh, LinkedIn for B2B behavior like this event is, you know, there's a lot of people here who will spend a ton of money to be here for B2B mm-hmm. And build a booth, but won't post on LinkedIn when they can be marketing to the people they're trying to reach here every day. Right. Uh, Substack. Writing longer form content about the great aspects of your business, and then being psychotically great at the pictures and videos and animated gif on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, uh, Snapchat.
Uh, that, that, that is, it is you could not commit more of your time and efforts to social organic, not paid organic creative, I don't think I'm speaking outta turn when I say you're the ultimate hype man. You're the ultimate spokesperson. Um, but how involved are you going to be is the face of the brand Gary V As much as it is the characters that you sell, we prefer for me not to be, if we can get away with it because it's more scalable.
Mm-hmm. But what's nice about being a personal brand that has scale and equity and conversion capabilities is if God forbid it doesn't go well, I'm not scared to come in and be the firefighter. Yeah. My preference is that we market this well. We've also got another personal brand and my wife who has a pretty big platform for health and wellness and, and again.
It's a really fun product. We're going on two things that are pretty extreme. People talk about healthy products here. Let there be no confusion, right? I hear ya. You know where I'm going. Yeah. By my wife's standards, 90% of things are not healthy here. And then on the complete opposite me, I believe that collectibles are about to drive CPG behavior in a way that 99% of people don't believe.
Here. If we're right about those two things, it will not need me to be in the content, but I am not. Uh. Too proud to not go in and have to save it with my personal brand if I have to, because I'm very proud of it. I may choose to not and do a different pro I I may decide, oh, we didn't hit the mark on fruit snacks.
That wasn't the right thing to attack. Right? So the thesis of CBG and collectible and clean ingredients is now set in stone for me for the rest of my career. I just might come out with something else if this doesn't have the traction, and I have the humility to be okay with, we didn't hit it. This is the hits business.
It happens. Yeah. Not all of Steven Spielberg's movies were the best, like you are in the Hits business. Not all of Michael Jackson's songs are iconic. I might uh, disagree with you on that one now gimme some on that. Me too. But, but you know this on Thriller. You know me and you might love PYT love that song.
And that's song a classic Love that song. Yeah. But there's even songs that I can't name on Thriller that are even below PYT. Sure. In a world where Mo pe most people just know a couple of them. Human nature by the way's, which is. Absurd. I mean that album's, I picked the wrong album. Every song's a banger, but I think we all know where I'm going here, which is.
I'm also okay if our subjective, strategic opinion of trying a better for you fruit snack was the wrong one, and we might come back in three years with a cereal or a protein shake or a cupcake, but the concept is very, in my head, extreme clean, extreme collectible is a differentiation to the 75,000 products out here.
Gary, I'm, I'm glad you brought that up, because not everything is a hit, and sometimes it can be hard for founders to admit that they made a mistake. Or they need to start over or they need to quit. I know you're not big on quitting, but what advice would you have for an entrepreneur that's kind of just stuck in the mud with their brand right now and thinking about their next move?
I'm obsessed with micro quitting. I'm not pumped about macro quitting, like living in your ba, you know, like you fail at your startup here and you move into your parents' basement and cry for the rest of your life. Bad, right? Micro quitting. AKA being thoughtful and self-aware. And humble enough to be like, wait a minute, this isn't the right product.
This isn't the right business, this isn't the right career for me. I'm in love with that level of self-awareness. There's a, there's a very fine line between putting, not quitting on a pedestal and not being self-aware enough to realize you're in the wrong spot. And so I'm a, I'm a I micro quit all the time.
Uh, I'll, let me give you a real life example. 15 months ago I had this idea called Podcast with friends, where I do a podcast with three random people that I thought were cool in mm-hmm. Culture. I quit it halfway through the first episode in my brain. 'cause I was like, I did three or four of them, but I'm like, this isn't it.
It's okay. Well, I mean, I think that's such great advice, which is don't give up completely. Just give up on the small things that aren't getting you to where you need to be. Don't be a quitter, but don't be delusional that what you're doing is right, and that's a very, very fine tune. But I think of it as macro, micro in the macro.
Never give up fighting for happiness and prosperity in the micro. Always be self-aware enough to know when you might not be in the right spot. Well, I'm self-aware enough to know that you have a booth of people who are crazy who want to see you right now, so. Gary, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it.
I wish you well. Really excited for the future. We're Very Luckee. Thank you. And rooting for you guys. Thank you so much.
