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Alumni Stories

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Best Friends turned Business Partners seeing rapid growth with their wedding day content company 'Follow the Bride'

Written by Blake Froistad

I'll be honest, I absolutely love weddings. I loved going to all my friends weddings, I loved my own wedding and I'll love whatever weddings I'll attend this year as life in your 20's and early 30's consists of wave after wave of weddings. However, I got married back in 2019 and quickly found out why George Banks had a breakdown at the supermarket over hot dogs and buns in Father of the Bride. Weddings are a lot to plan and as a guy, I totally underestimated what all went into them until I passively started just saying yes to everything leading up to our big day. My wife knocked it out of the park, and the day could not have been better. But a big part of that, were all the vendors that quietly all played their parts perfectly and provided a blissful experience for my wife, our family, and friends to all enjoy. I remember swiping through Instagram Stories the next day reliving the wedding through all our friends who had posted the night before. But wouldn't it be great if you had someone to capture the play by play on your big day, but not have to wait for content like you do with professional photos and videos? Well, that's just what Brooke Wilson (Sewell '13) and Lexie Heil (O'Dowd '13) thought when they started Follow the Bride. 

Lexie Heil (left) and Brooke Wilson (right)

Brooke and Lexie's friendship goes way back to 2009 when they met freshman year at Valor. After graduating in 2013, Lexie was off to Nashville to study Communication at Vanderbilt. Brooke went off to CSU where she studied Finance, and later completed her MBA at CU. Despite changing zip codes and pursuing career goals, their friendship flourished and they stayed connected. Lexie carved out a career in digital marketing working for numerous companies running their social media. Brooke quickly worked her way up at Lockheed Martin holding various positions in finance. Brooke married her high school sweetheart, Marcus Wilson ('13) in 2021, while Lexie tied the knot with her husband Christian in 2022. Turns out Brooke and Lexie both caught the wedding bug and saw an opportunity to start something of their own. Talking with Brooke, "After my wedding was over I had the wedding blues and realized how much I loved all things weddings. Shortly after, Lexie and I decided to launch follow the bride!" 

The wedding vendor space provides many opportunities for small businesses. Combine that with the emergence of platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram and Snapchat, and you have yourself an entire market segment to capture. Talking with Lexie, "We were best friends planning our weddings simultaneously and fell in love with the whole process. On our wedding days, we gave each other the job of capturing all the behind the scenes content, but It was hard with each of us being in the wedding. The content we did get was some of our favorites! We knew we had found our passion and wanted to make sure other brides had these moments to relive. We kept saying how ideal it would be to have someone like this capturing content that isn’t part of your wedding party, and that’s how Follow the Bride happened." 

Brooke and Lexie provide a variety of options and expertise on how they go about capturing day of content. They can either take over your social media accounts creating Reels, Tik-Toks and capturing photos for Stories to post in live time. They can also capture all the behind the scenes content for you to create post-wedding day as well. But before you go firing your photographer and videographer, they actually work with them to capture raw photos and videos so the clients can include this in their galleries or final professional video as well. But it is that instantaneous ability to have high quality content ready to post that really sets Brooke and Lexie's business apart from any other photographer and videographer. The added bonus is, you're not stuck having someone else try and capture all these moments who is supposed to be enjoying the day alongside you. 

With Brooke being in Denver, Lexie being in Chicago, and both of them having full-time jobs, they eased into this thinking they'd cover Denver and Chicago and slowly grow it while doing keeping their full-time jobs. But after a feature on Good Day Colorado, and working with clients like Courtland Sutton, Derrick Rose, Bridget Bahl and professional MMA fighter Grant Neal, their small business is rapidly expanding coast to coast and even international. When reflecting on how far they've come in the last year of this business, and looking back at life in general, "We never thought we'd be doing this together, but we love it. We are so blessed and can't thank God enough along with our friends and family for supporting us and believing in us!" If you'd like to get in touch with Brooke and Lexie, you can email them at followingthebride@gmail.com. To review their previous work, be sure to check them out on Instagram and Tik-Tok. They offer a variety of packages ranging from: 

  • Something Borrowed (6 hours of capturing content)
  • Something New (8 hours of capturing content)
  • Something Blue (10 hours, full day of capturing content) 

We love seeing our alumni succeed, and couldn't be happier that these 2 alums are doing it together. 

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