She Spent $680 On A Camcorder To Start A 'Nostalgic' Wedding Video Business — Now It's A $1.7M Success

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, CNBC reported.

The Denver-based company rents camcorders to 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.

A Budget Alternative as Wedding Videography Tops $4,000

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 the Zola 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.

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, told The Knot she recently had a couple request their entire day be filmed and edited on camcorder.

From Side Hustle to Full-Time in Two Months

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.

She paired the $680 camcorder with a $290 (£219) Squarespace website. Before she had a single wedding client, she filmed bachelorette trips and posted the results to TikTok. Two clips in early May 2025 pulled in a combined 300,000-plus views. Within 10 days of launching, Carroll had 50 orders and more than $36,000 (£27,200) in sales, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC.

By July 2025, she left her corporate job. She declined to disclose her salary from the business but said it was 'substantially' more than her previous income.

'Even just launching in May, I paid more in taxes for 2025 than I was making in my salary before,' she said.

The upfront payment model meant Wedding Weekender had been self-funded from day one. Carroll now runs a four-person team from a warehouse and office in Denver and contracts freelance video editors to handle post-production. The business crossed $1 million (£756,000) in total sales by March 2026.

The service ships a ready-to-use camcorder box four to six days before a wedding. Guests film across the weekend and return the equipment by prepaid UPS label within 72 hours. Raw footage is organised within two to three weeks, with the final edited video delivered roughly five to seven weeks after the event, according to the company's website.

Carroll said she has received requests to expand beyond weddings into bachelorette trips, birthday parties and baby showers. 'I'm personally excited that I feel like I built a business that everyone's always going to want,' she told CNBC.