29-year-old spent $1,000 to launch a wedding camcorder business—it brought in $1.7 million in sales in less than a year

In April 2025, Anne Marie Carroll dropped about $680 on a Sony camcorder she found on Amazon and another $290 to launch a Squarespace site for her new business idea.

By the end of May, she'd brought in roughly 36 times her initial investment in sales.

Carroll, 29, of Denver is the founder and CEO of Wedding Weekender, a service that rents out camcorders to couples to capture their weddings and also edits footage into video clips for them.

She'd initially thought of the concept after her own wedding to her husband, Bryan, in August 2024; she says she wasn't happy with the cost of the videography options she found and ended up hiring a college student for the day. Around the same time, Carroll says she saw other friends trim their wedding video budgets due to costs and to prioritize still photography.

Meanwhile, Carroll recalls noticing a resurgence in Y2K-era media with her friends bringing their own disposable or digital cameras to events to capture fun moments.

It sparked an idea: Carroll wanted to marry Gen Z's craving for nostalgia with their appetite for budget-conscious solutions by offering her camcorder-rental and video-editing service.

Carroll used that first camcorder she bought to film TikTok videos explaining the concept of Wedding Weekender. She'd brought the camcorder to a few bachelorette trips in April 2025 and posted clips to show the potential of what she could deliver to customers, even if she didn't yet have any footage from a real wedding.

As it turns out, that didn't matter. Two viral clips that have now racked up a combined 300,000-plus views on TikTok, posted in early May 2025, led to the first surge in orders. Within 10 days of launching, Wedding Weekender brought in 50 orders and over $36,000 in sales, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. As of March 2026, the business surpassed $1 million in sales.

Now, just shy of its one-year mark, Wedding Weekender has logged over 2,000 orders and delivered over 650 videos, Carroll says. The business has surpassed $1.7 million in sales and Carroll predicts it will hit $2 million by May.

The business's core package goes for $729 and includes the rental of one camcorder for a week and a three- to five-minute edited video from the Wedding Weekender team; a deluxe package bumps the deal up to two camcorders and a five- to seven-minute video and costs $989.

Wedding Weekender's offerings are relatively low-cost compared to typical spending. Carroll says most of her clients use her services as an alternative to traditional wedding videographer services, which cost an average of nearly $4,000 nationwide, according to data from Zola. Most couples spend between $3,200 and $4,800 on this line item, or roughly 8% of their wedding budget, per the site.

"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 says.

The nostalgia business is booming. Companies are tapping into Gen Z's desire to return to simpler times before smartphones and social media — and counting on their willingness to pay up to mimic the aesthetic. Businesses ranging from mall retailers to tech startups have done well for themselves by tapping into the trend through products and services, such as vinyl records and landline-style phones.

Carroll says she believes Wedding Weekender has taken off for similar reasons. Many of her peers are tired of seeing picture-perfect and curated visuals around big moments on social media, she says, and are instead leaning into '90s and 2000s-era visuals and the gritty aesthetic of raw footage.

"Videographers are very talented at what they do, but I think people just want videos that bring you back to the moment itself, and aren't as like movie trailer-esque," Carroll says.

The concept encourages people to get more personal in their on-camera appearances, she adds: "[This] type of footage feels so real because you're going to act very different when it's your friend or cousin behind the camera versus a videographer."

Carroll had previously worked in advertising and started Wedding Weekender as a side hustle; after two months of explosive growth, she says, she officially made it her full-time gig by July 2025.

She declined to share how much she earns from Wedding Weekender but says it's "substantially" more than what she earned from her former 9-to-5 job. "Even just launching in May, I paid more in taxes [for 2025] than I was making in my salary before," she says.

Couples pay for their services up front, and the initial rush of orders means the business has been self-funded from the beginning, Carroll says: "We had that cash then to continue to buy more camcorders and packaging and everything from there."

Now she has has a team of four full-time employees who help in operations, including at a warehouse and office space in Denver, and a team of video editors hired on a freelance basis.

It was hard to leave a stable corporate career path to bet on her own business, Carroll says. But then again, "I've always had a goal to work for myself," she says. "So when this opportunity arose, and there was clearly enough demand for me to be pursuing it full time and making just as much, it didn't make it as hard" to take the leap.

Wedding Weekender serves couples across the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia and already has orders going into 2027.

Couples receive their camcorder a few days ahead of their ceremony and are welcome to film events leading up to it. "People really love our product for being able to capture the rehearsal dinner, the welcome party, or all the in-between [moments] throughout the best weekend of their lives," Carroll says.

Having worked with hundreds of couples by now, Carroll has advice for making the most of a wedding camcorder experience.

First, she recommends assigning a few people in the wedding party to capture specific moments throughout the day, like the bride's preparations, first dances, or speeches later in the reception. Pick an outgoing bridesmaid or groomsman to go around and interview guests during cocktail hour or the reception, she says, or leave the camcorder near the guest book for people who want to record a video message.

One thing couples should definitely plan for is to get the camcorder out on the dance floor.

"People have so much fun passing it around," Carroll says. "That footage is just always [where] the camcorder is being fought over."

Carroll says she's excited to see the trend of personalized and candid wedding videography evolve. She's also gotten requests to offer Wedding Weekender services for bachelorette trips, birthday parties, baby showers and other big life moments.

Whatever milestones they may want to capture, she says, "I'm personally excited that I feel like I built a business that everyone's always going to want."

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