When social media manager Kiley Leff started booking vendors for multi-day weddings in Antigua, she ticked the traditional box: flower shops, bands, videographers, photographers, and more. But she also added a request that previous generations had never thought of: wedding content creators.
Job description of wedding content creator? Someone can take candid iPhone photos, as well as people she, her fiancé and their 80 guests can post on social media. “I like the idea of something that doesn’t look good. On your wedding day, you want people to really think and believe and see that it’s more than just a super restaurant or accent.”
While scrolling on Instagram, she found people: Alexandra O’Connor and Lois Bellamy, founders of Bride Social Media, Inc. Bride’s content.
O’Connor and Bellamy, two former brand social media editors, created content for the bride’s content during lunch at Shoreditch House in London in 2023. Their idea came from both an anecdotal hunt—many of their friends asked them to take fly-on-the-wall iPhone footage during their weddings—and a keen understanding of statistical trends: 76% of US adults aged between 18 and 29 are active on Instagram and 59% are active on TikTok, According to the Pew Center. They are used to sharing the most mundane aspects of life and watching other people’s lives through their phones. certainly They want to post about the wedding day.
Here’s the thing: The aesthetic that dominates smartphones is not high-resolution portraits or stylized videos. It’s frank (or candid) handheld content. While professional photographers write formal portraits of their lives, O’Connor and Bellamy believe that Gen-Z and millennial brides may want to watch their wedding with a more existing, more realistic Lo-Fi lens. “I saw this disconnect in the real life of the bride, and it was really missing that moment, real, shareable content,” O’Connor said. Then, there was only the memory itself: generations kept everything in albums, and many today store them on iPhones or iClouds.
Two years later, the business flourished. From May to October, almost every weekend (commonly known as the warm extension of the “wedding season” in the Western Hemisphere) O’Connor and Bellamy are booked, whether it’s a London civil ceremony or a blowout carnival in Portugal. When I talked to them via Zoom, Bellamy had just returned from a four-day wedding in an Ireland castle, just a few days away from flying to Croatia. Meanwhile, O’Connor went to Ibiza shortly afterwards, and then southern France.
