Recorderly

People ask how a company that mails cameras to parties gets started. It wasn’t a plan. It was one wedding I couldn’t get to: Rebecca and Arnold’s in Sonoma, California. Before Recorderly, we were a small crew in Miami filming weddings, quinceañeras and birthdays. Referrals spread, we hired more videographers, and my husband slowly built a website so people could find us. Then Rebecca’s wedding came, and I couldn’t be there. Sending nothing felt wrong, so we mailed her a camera instead. Her guests filmed the day, sent it back, and we edited the footage. What came back was different. It wasn’t a wedding film from the outside. It was the day from the inside: from the tables, the hallway, the dance floor, filmed by the people who were actually part of it. We watched it twice. Somewhere during the second viewing, I stopped watching as an editor. I felt like I was at the wedding. That was when we realized we’d been doing this the hard way. Today we have more cameras and editors, but every film is still edited by a person. No templates. No automatic edits. We’d rather turn down an event than deliver something we wouldn’t want for our own family. The moments people treasure are often the ones they forgot happened: a grandparent laughing, a familiar face in the background, a conversation they never heard. You only get these days once. If you trust us with yours, we don’t take that lightly.