A Sony camcorder for around $680 and a Squarespace site costing $290. Those are the few ingredients with which Anne Marie Carroll, 29, launched Wedding Weekender in April 2025, a venture that now approaches $2 million in sales just under a year after launch. The young Denver-based entrepreneur’s idea is to rent camcorders to soon-to-be-married couples to document their weddings, then offer professional editing of the footage afterward.
By the end of May 2025, Carroll had taken in roughly 36 times her initial investment. Here is how she rapidly turned a side project, born in her spare time, into a full-time business.
How Wedding Weekender started
The intuition behind the wedding-camera rental concept came from the founder’s own experience. Carroll married her husband Bryan in August 2024 and, while shopping for videography for the ceremony, ran into prices that did not convince her. In the end, she chose to hire a college student to cover the day. Around the same time, some of her friends were trimming wedding-video budgets and prioritizing traditional photography instead.
A second observation reinforced the idea: her generation’s rediscovery of the Y2K aesthetic. The term Y2K (an acronym for “Year 2000”) refers to the visual and cultural style of the early 2000s, now back in fashion especially among younger consumers, characterized by bright colors and a deliberately “imperfect” look. Her friends were bringing disposable or digital cameras to events to capture authentic, unstaged moments. Carroll saw, at the intersection of Gen Z nostalgia and the demand for more affordable solutions, room for a business idea.
The TikTok launch: two viral videos with over 300,000 views
To communicate the Wedding Weekender concept, Carroll used a camcorder she had bought for $680 to start the business. In April 2025, she brought the device to several bachelorette parties, with the goal of showing the service’s potential, even though she had not yet filmed an actual wedding.
The breakthrough came in early May 2025, when two videos posted on TikTok collectively gathered more than 300,000 views, triggering the first wave of orders. In the first ten days after launch, Wedding Weekender logged 50 bookings and more than $36,000 in sales. By March 2026, the business had already crossed $1 million in revenue. Nearly a year after its debut, Wedding Weekender has totaled more than 2,000 orders and delivered more than 650 videos. Sales have surpassed $1.7 million, and Carroll expects to hit $2 million by May.
The packages Wedding Weekender offers
The basic Wedding Weekender package costs $729 and includes a one-week camcorder rental plus a three-to-five-minute edited video produced by the in-house team. The deluxe version goes up to $989, comes with two camcorders, and includes a longer video, between five and seven minutes.
The pricing is well below traditional rates. According to data compiled by the wedding-planning platform Zola, in the United States a wedding videography package costs on average just under $4,000, with couples typically spending between $3,200 and $4,800, around 8% of their total wedding budget. «The most frequent feedback we get from couples is how happy they are to have found our service, because otherwise they would not have been able to document their wedding on video», Carroll says.
Wedding Weekender today serves couples in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, with orders booked as far out as 2027. Couples receive the camcorder a few days before the ceremony and can also use it to film side events, from the rehearsal dinner to the welcome reception.
The nostalgia business and the ’90s aesthetic
Wedding Weekender’s success fits into a broader trend, that of nostalgia marketing. Many companies are building meaningful revenue by tapping younger consumers’ desire to rediscover the pre-smartphone, pre-social-media atmosphere, offering products ranging from vinyl records to corded-handset-style telephones.
Carroll attributes the boom of her business precisely to this dynamic. Her peers, she explains, say they are tired of the perfectly curated images that dominate social media in life’s most important moments and are returning to the rough, authentic look of ’90s and early-2000s footage:
«Videographers are very good at what they do, but I think people want videos that bring you back to the moment itself, without everything looking like a movie trailer. This kind of footage is authentic because in front of a friend or a cousin holding the camcorder, people behave completely differently than they do in front of a professional videographer».
From side hustle to full-time job
Carroll came from a career in advertising and had launched Wedding Weekender as a side hustle. After two months of explosive growth, in July 2025 she decided to leave her job to focus full time on the project. She declined to disclose how much she earns today, but specified that it is a figure «substantially» higher than her previous full-time salary. «Just from the May launch alone, I paid more in taxes in 2025 than I used to make as my entire annual salary», she said.
The business model has proved self-financing. Couples pay for services in advance, and that upfront cash allowed the company to immediately reinvest in new camcorders and shipping materials, without external funding. Wedding Weekender today employs four full-time staffers working between the warehouse and the Denver offices, plus a roster of video editors hired on a freelance basis.
The shift to entrepreneur was also a personal challenge:
«I always had the goal of working for myself. When this opportunity came along, with demand clearly large enough to let me go full time and earn just as much, becoming a founder became less daunting».
Looking ahead, Carroll says she has received requests to extend the service to bachelor and bachelorette parties, birthdays, baby showers, and other significant life moments. «I’m personally thrilled to have built a business that everyone is always going to want», she said.
Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by P. F. on May 09, 2026 as «Questa 29enne ha guadagnato $1,7 milioni in un anno noleggiando videocamere per matrimoni». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
