Anne Marie Carroll spent $680 (£514) on a Sony camcorder from Amazon in April 2025. Less than a year later, the business she built around it, Wedding Weekender, has pulled in $1.7 million (£1.28 million) in sales and is on track to hit $2 million (£1.51 million) by May,CNBCreported.
The Denver-based companyrents camcordersto couples getting married and edits the footage their guests capture into short wedding films. Its core package costs $729 (£551) for one camcorder and a three- to five-minute edited video. A deluxe option at $989 (£747) includes two camcorders and a longer film.
The company has processed more than 2,000 orders and delivered over 650 videos since launching. It now serves couples in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, with bookings already stretching into 2027.
Professional wedding videography now averages $3,993 (£3,020) across the United States, with most couples spending between $3,200 (£2,420) and $4,800 (£3,630). That figure typically accounts for roughly 8 per cent of an overall wedding budget, according to theZola Wedding Cost Index.
The cost has pushed couples toward alternatives. Zola's 2026 Wedding Spend Survey found that one in five couples now hire a non-traditional vendor, with wedding content creators ranking as the most requested category at 22 per cent of all such hires.
Carroll, 29, said her clients fall squarely into that gap. 'The most common feedback we receive from couples is how happy they were to find our service because they otherwise wouldn't have been able to capture video of their wedding,' she told CNBC.
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The camcorder format also taps a nostalgia trend running through the broader wedding industry. Gen Z now makes up the majority of engaged couples in the US for the first time, and planners say the generation is drawn to analogue textures. Lauren Ladouceur, founder of Plan With Laur, toldThe Knotshe recently had a couple request their entire day be filmed and edited on camcorder.
Carroll, a former advertising professional, came up with the concept after her own wedding to husband Bryan in August 2024. She said she was frustrated by the cost of videography and ended up hiring a college student. Friends were making the same trade-off or dropping video entirely to prioritise photography.
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Source: International Business Times UK
