When social media manager Kiley Leff began to book vendors for her multi-day wedding in Antigua, she ticked off the traditional boxes: florist, band, videographer, photographer and so on. But she also added one that previous generations had never thought to request: a wedding content creator.
The job description of a wedding content creator? Someone to take candid iPhone photos—and videos—of her, her fiancée, and their 80 guests that they could post on social media. “I love the idea of things that just don’t look too hyper-polished. On your wedding day, you want people to really think and believe and see that this wasn’t all just super-fake or embellished,” Leff says.
While scrolling on Instagram, she found just the people: Alexandra O’Connor and Lois Bellamy, founders of the bridal social media firm Content for Brides.
O’Connor and Bellamy, two former brand social media editors, founded Content for Brides in 2023 over lunch at Shoreditch House in London. Their idea came from both an anecdotal hunch—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 U.S. adults aged between 18 and 29 are active on Instagram and 59% are active on TikTok, according to the Pew Center. They’re used to sharing even the most mundane aspects of their lives, and observing the lives of others, through their phones. Of course they want to post about their wedding days.
And here’s the thing: The aesthetic that reigns supreme on smartphones isn’t high-resolution portraiture or stylized video. It’s candid (or candid-seeming) handheld content. While a professional photographer delivers posed formal portraits meant to be framed for a lifetime—Gen-Z and Millennial brides, O’Connor and Bellamy figured, might want to view their wedding through a more off-the-cuff, lo-fi lens. “I saw this disconnect in real life of brides really missing that instant, authentic, shareable content,” O’Connor says. Then, there were just the memories themselves: While generations prior kept everything in photo albums, many today store them on iPhones or in iClouds.
Two years later, business is booming. Nearly every weekend from May to October (the warm-weather stretch that’s colloquially known in the Western Hemisphere as “wedding season”) O’Connor and Bellamy are booked, whether it be for a London civil ceremony or a blowout bash in Portugal. When I speak to them over Zoom, Bellamy has just come back from a four-day wedding at a castle in Ireland, and is days away from flying to Croatia. O’Connor, meanwhile, is off to Ibiza and then the South of France soon after.
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On their website, they advertise packages like a “London City Wedding” (eight hours of coverage) and “European Destination Wedding” (12 hours wedding day coverage, three hours of complimentary welcome-party coverage). But they tell me that most of the time, the services end up being bespoke to each client. Here’s an average rundown: They’ll fly to your wedding. For the next 24, 48, 72, or even 96 hours, O’Connor or Bellamy will take pictures and videos of everything and anything you want…all while abiding to your dress code. (Leff mentions that O’Connor blended in with the crowd so well that many of her guests assumed that she was a friend rather than a hired vendor: “She is a girlie,” she says, laughing. “Alex was there with a smile on her face, down to be dancing.”)
When you send them back to their hotel room is up to you. But once they are there, they’ll pull an all-nighter editing. “The minute we’re home from that event, we start uploading. We’ll pull everything into folders. If it was a typical wedding day, we will have a folder for getting ready with the girls, ceremony, first look, cutting in the cake, fireworks,” O’Connor explains. When the couple wakes up the next morning, the assets are already in their inbox, carefully labeled.
Some brides and grooms just want the raw footage, especially of what O’Connor and Bellamy describe as “behind-the-scenes” moments. (The two estimate that 80% of their content is videos and 20% are photos, with many leaving the latter to the professional photographers.) Others want a more specialized approach. O’Connor and Bellamy often find themselves filming and editing TikToks, sometimes making up to 25 videos per wedding weekend. They’ll also work with the bride on a tailored rollout plan across her socials.
As a result, they’ve attracted a fair amount of social media personalities as clients. Many of them want to share their wedding with their online followers, but don’t want to spend the entire day worrying about how to create their own content. “I wanted someone to capture our wedding day through the iPhone because I thought it was something that was important to my job,” says Kaylie Stewart, a TikTok creator with over a million followers who wed last August in the Amalfi Coast. “I wanted to be present on the day, and I didn’t want to have to worry about filming those moments,” she says. The video O’Connor captured of her first look with her now-husband went viral.
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Although like Leff, Stewart concurs that a big reason she hired Content for Brides was to have her memories captured in a more digital-friendly-format: “It was important for me to have those memories through my iPhone, just to be able to look back and just see the special moments that were captured,” she says.
So are wedding content creators a fad—or a business that is here to stay? Stewart points out that, in some cases, it might make more sense for a couple to hire one instead of a videographer. “iPhone footage is a bit more of an affordable option, and you’re still able to get these beautiful edits and videos captured from the day,” she says. Leff, meanwhile, adds that at her wedding, it enhanced the guest experience, who could just enjoy the evening without worrying about taking pictures. “We had a Dropbox that she [O’Connor] added immediately every single night of all of this beautiful iPhone content,” she says. “All of the guests had the link—we wanted everyone to be able to go through the pictures and find cute ones of themselves or cute ones they want to post without feeling like they need to be glued to their phone all night.”
O’Connor also adds, “There’s just been a huge shift over the last five years in the way that we consume media—shifting to more authenticity over polish. Modern couples come to us wanting a more native, authentic view of their wedding day.” Maybe tailoring your wedding content to be trending isn’t a trend after all.
