The Future of CPG: Why Collectibility and Clean Ingredients are Winning

0:00In 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. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience. 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 the 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. Your booth is mobbed. You have been talking to people left and right, which is awesome. I mean, this is kind of your thing.

0:34I mean, you love talking to people. I do like people. But we're here today to talk about Very Lucky, 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 with two partners who were former interns of my agency. CPG, VaynerMedia started to start brands like this. So in some ways it's been in the works for 15 years. On the other side, V-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.

1:15You know, like Count Chocula and Flintstones 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 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 very lucky. V friends was getting big enough where we could make a 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 let's use our most important character in VeeFriends is called Very, Very, Very, Very Lucky Black Cat.

2:31So that's where the name comes from. Gary B is one of the big characters in VeeFriends. So he shows up here. We've got the stickers inside. But most of all, what has 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 pusher there. You know, getting into CPG is tough. Getting into kids' products 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.

3:06It's what I've done my whole life. And contemporary marketing is live shopping. It's GEO and AEO search result optimization, which means showing up first if somebody said, what's the cleanest snack for my kids on ChatGPT or showing up, so we'll be good at that. live shopping is just something we're incredibly strong at so I anticipate selling this on TikTok shop on whatnot on eBay live in a very aggressive way because don't forget it's a collectible not just a CPG 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 going to say it nice and slow and I I'm saying this because I'm bragging on my wife, this is the cleanest fruit snack in the market.

3:53Like 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 because there is no competitive product yet. And I hope there'll be many, by the way, I want the world to be healthier. So I think we have a very strong go-to-market plan on why this can be differentiated and gain some heat. Social marketing can be expensive. Sometimes it can be effective just having influencers and folks who are just well-versed in that type of platforms, those type of platforms.

4:38But how are you going to approach social media in a way that is cost effective or very lucky. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola, an original and cherry vanilla. That Pepsi taste you love with just 30 calories and no artificial sweeteners. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola, unbelievably Pepsi. I say this with as much, I hope everyone doesn't get upset with me here, but I'm going to go as humble as I can on this. I believe that many people would say that I'm the godfather of this game. Sure. How am I going to do it because 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.

5:20I 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 because of the moms I'm looking at. I have an agency with 3 ,000 people that are 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 is he gonna do in this new version of a basketball game this is my great comfort zone I'm very confident in it and it's disproportionately our biggest strength as an organization and organizations and you know in the same way I built up Empathy Wines have had a substantial exit to consolation we're not looking to exit this brand we're looking for this to be a brand builder for the overall vFriends universe.

6:12But I feel very confident in our ability to make day-to-day organic social content over-indexed 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 want to learn about how you're going about introducing the brand. And I did it a little bit there and now I thank you for the follow-up. Let me 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 views 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 organic social as the starting but being on every platform.

7:06YouTube Shorts for GEO and AEO to show up on Gemini. 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 and build a booth but won't post on LinkedIn where they could be marketing to the people who are trying to reach here every day. Substack, writing longer form content about the great aspects of your business and then being psychotically great at the pictures and videos and animated GIFs on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat. That is, it is, you could not commit more of your time and efforts to social, organic, not paid, organic, creative.

7:50Hey everybody, I hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy. I don't think I'm speaking at a tone when I say you're the ultimate hype man. You're the ultimate spokesperson. But how involved are you going to be? Is the face of the brand Gary Vee 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. 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.

8:25My 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 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. I hear you. You know where I'm going. 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.

8:59but I am not 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, I may decide, oh, we didn't hit the mark on fruit snacks. That wasn't the right thing to attack. So the thesis of CPG 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. Not all of Steven Spielberg's movies were the best. Like, you're in the hits business.

9:39Not all of Michael Jackson's songs are iconic. I might disagree with you on that. By the way, give me some on that. Me too. But you know this, on Thriller, you know, me and you might love PYT and that's a classic. But there's even songs that I can't name on Thriller that are even below PYT in a world where most people just know a couple of them. Human nature, by the way. Which is absurd. I mean, that album, 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.

10:15And 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 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.

10:47I'm not pumped about macro quitting, like living in your, 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. 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 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 micro quit all the time. Let me give you a real example.

11:2715 months ago I had this idea called Podcasts with Friends where I do a podcast with three random people that I thought were cool in culture. I quit it halfway through the first episode in my brain because 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 because 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 this macro micro. In the macro, never give up fighting for happiness and prosperity.

12:02In 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. I'm excited for the future. We're very lucky and rooting for you guys. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm glad we're here. So we have a show we've been doing for six years called Founder's Story. So we interview amazing founders just so you get the concept. Thank you. I have to say, before we get into the question, your ability to connect with fans is incredible.

12:33I was listening. How much people pour into you is just amazing. Like the fact that you keep up your energy. Thank you, brother. Like it should inspire the world. But this new line, Very Lucky Gummies, why is this so important to you right now? Many reasons. One, it's important because it's another building block in one of the biggest businesses I'm ever trying to build, which is VFriends. This is my Pokemon, you know, Sesame Street, Marvel, Disney-like universe that I'm building. VCon was a piece of it. This is a piece of it. Two, it's taking two very substantial theses that I have, one for me and one for my wife.

13:11So as you might have seen, it's not in the packaging yet, but my wife, there we go, exactly, there she is. my wife Mona is one of the leading clean advocates in the world. Her standard of a clean healthy lifestyle is dramatically higher than 99 % of the people here. Like this event is not clean enough for her. So every ingredient in this this is unequivocally now somebody could be tied I don't know what's new out here but unequivocally this is the cleanest fruit candy in the marketplace. There is not one chemical-based product in here. We put 15 months of work to get this to work. There's no compromising.

13:56So A, it's important to me because it's establishing a new category which is 100%, 100%, 100 % clean. Like really clean. And then on the other side, it's executing on a thesis I have which is collectibles are about to impact CPG. That the Cracker Jack toy inside, the cereal toys we're going to get, that real, I mean, this sticker, if somebody gets it in one of these boxes, will sell for$1 ,000 on eBay. That creates a new dynamic in food that doesn't exist today. So I believe those two trends, extreme clean and collectibles as marketing in CPG are about to be two much bigger categories of execution in the next several years.

14:45This brand accompanies that. It's going to be launched on live shopping first. I'm not even worried about meeting any store here. I'm not looking for distribution. This will be direct to consumer in a social and live shopping environment. And I'm proud of it. You used to collect those exciting. That's right. Gary, you know, conference like this where the floor is dominated by big brands or big budget. How can small, you know, no budget, small business can still win and get attention? I think humanity and creativity. You know, you don't need a lot of money. You can do something left field. In fact, you could go the opposite.

15:24You could have a booth here where you're just standing with one little purple table like this and you're just in a box. And I bet you a lot of people come because they would love the humility. Right? So you just have to be creative. You have to be humble. You have to be human. I think if you're going to be a small brand here, if you're going to come here, you need to be very personable. If you're introverted and you're a small brand and you have no money, you're in trouble. But if you have no money to make a big presence, but you have a big heart and a big personality and great human skills, you can go up to people, anything can happen.

16:00You don't even need a booth that can do damage here. And so that's why I love these kind of events. I love when a lot of humans congregate, Comic Con, Sports Card National, Expo West, South by Southwest. These things matter. And for me, I was the person that had no money but had the human skills. And so I grew that way and I've watched many others grow that way. And I hope that's encouraging to people because it's very real. I'm not selling a dream here. That's how many have done it. So we used to sell on Amazon. Oh my god, I did it in 2012, Gary. From my garage,$20, so a million in 12 months.

16:40And me and one person and virtual assistants, I scale it to 20 million. It didn't last like a 10 years runway, but I was able to pivot and do things. But during that time, we were doing live selling on Amazon back in like 2016. I remember. But people didn't really buy, because I think it was too soon. And the tech wasn't right, and it was different. It was different. How do you see it now? I mean, because we also spend time in Asia where it's crazy. Oh my God, there's dominates there. It's everything. It's the biggest opportunity for people in the world right now. Live social shopping, especially in the West, in the East, to your point, China's been doing it.

17:16It's more saturated. Here, the opportunity is extraordinary. That's what I think. So we wrote a book called Unlimited Possibilities that just came out. And it's all about breaking through the barriers that we thought existed for us. What was an unlimited possibility moment for you? Being born to a mother, who created that framework for me at such a young age that I've never known anything else. The book you wrote and what you believe in, you learned along the way. I never knew anything else. Not because I'm great, but because I got put into a great spot because I had a great mentor, a great mother.

17:53And then also, I got lucky. I immigrated to the United States. We had no money. I was poor. Everything just kind of stacked up in my favor. so the real answer to your question without bullshit is being born I hope we can all be the same to our kids no Gary this is a whole new ball game working with your wife how does that yeah it's uh it's great I mean you know Mona I would just talk to her this morning she would sit here and be like hey I only just did the formula I'm not really working with him But I told her, hey baby, this can't be what it is without you. This brand, I believe, has two levers to take it to the moon.

18:40The collectible is marketing and how clean it is. Air One is successful for many reasons, but most people understand the optionality of such purely clean food is a huge addressable market that a lot of people are not feeding. so how is it? It's been really fun I'm also very good at letting people like do their thing so I'm not trying to go into Mona's territory she knows this shit better than I do like when I look at these ingredients I'm like okay now I'm more educated and I actually do know but I don't know better than her she made a late change on like the honey had to be organic from this far like she's in it she's in it and I'm very good with strangers and empowering them to do their thing that I think they do better than me, I'm definitely willing to do that with my wife.

19:30Man, it sounds like us. Divide and conquer, right? The only time we argue is when we try and work. Get into each other. Yeah, exactly. I said, this is my lane. I'll ask you, but that's your expertise. I'm not going to jump in. Yeah, my brother and I did that very successful. My father tried to bleed into my stuff a lot, and that created a lot of friction when we were building that business. And any time I wanted to go into his territory, it caused the same issue. And so I do think partnerships are at their best where you could divide and conquer. You can over-communicate with each other, bounce some ideas, but you've got to have, it's almost like a football team, an offense and defensive coordinator.

20:08You might talk to each other, but like you're making the decision. There's no such thing as two cooks in the kitchen. There's no such thing as two co-CEOs. It's tax season and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number, 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it guaranteed. One last big number, save up to 40 % your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for the threats you can't control.

20:46Terms apply. Yeah, absolutely. I always tell everyone that I'm her executive assistant. I get it. I can sense it. As long as I'm the boss. Now, how do you avoid date nights not talking about business? It's hard not to. For you guys, it would be, if I was as deep with Mona in business as you guys are, it would be impossible. But again, this is kind of a lightweight project. And it's early. If this gets going, I could see that becoming a bigger. But honestly, I prefer that. Yeah. Like I love what I think the best relationships is when people have similar interests You both are interested in your business.

21:22It gives you a lot to talk about I think we demonize it as something as like don't bring your work to dinner, but you guys both like it Yes, I don't after 8 p.m. Don't talk about that. We try Like it yeah, we like it and it works for you like you love I could tell you love it You live your business you you love that like watching out here like even when we went to VCon, I always tell everyone, like it's the only place I've ever seen where somebody shows their arm and they have a tattoo of your face. Like it was so amazing watching this. I'm like, I am so freaking inspired, man. Yeah, thank you.

21:56I mean, thank you so much for this today and everything you do. Pleasure, thank you. Thanks Gary. Everybody, if you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention and thanks for being part of this journey. See you later.