Ask Lauren and Amar Grewal about their wedding day, and they would tell you it began the same way it ended: with personalized messages.
Before their March 2025 ceremony in Los Cabos, Mexico, the bride, who owns a catering business, penned letters to her closest friends and family. In return, guests could leave a message to the couple at the reception. Only their messages, instead of being handwritten, came after a dial tone.
Some newlyweds are replacing traditional guest books, which typically existed as a record of attendance, with the voices of their guests. These intimate recordings may come through services like After the Tone, the Other Line, LifeOnRecord, FêteFone and At the Beep, that refurbish vintage or vintage-style rotary phones and place digital recorders inside. The packages typically cost $300 to $800.
After seeing audio guest books on Instagram, the Grewals, who are 28 and live in Newport Beach, Calif., knew they wanted one. And so, as guests congregated and champagne was poured, they wandered over to a strikingly pink rotary phone and a sign that simply said, “Leave us a message.” And that, Lauren said, is what their guests did, “tenfold.”
One of Lauren’s most cherished recordings came from her paternal grandmother, Kathy Malafronte, who recalled watching the couple walk down the aisle together and the love she felt for them. Through tears, she joked that she was surprised she managed to keep herself together before correcting herself: She hadn’t — and wasn’t now, during this voice message, either.
The company the Grenwals used, After the Tone, considers itself an “audio archivist of sorts,” said Bailey Yackley, a founder with her husband, Jacob Yackley. She added that the idea grew out of her love of saving old voice mail messages. The Yackleys buy midcentury rotary phones from antiques dealers and salvage lots, and install recording technology inside the empty casings with a custom greeting.
After an event, audio files are transferred and a couple can choose to have their recordings transferred to a custom vinyl record, a USB drive or a cassette (the Grenwals chose vinyl and display it in their home).
Michelle Durpetti of the Chicago-based Michelle Durpetti Events, which has planned weddings for more than two decades, said this trend shows how the bound guest book has evolved as couples sought “experiences that felt more personal and interactive.”
Timothy D. Malefyt, who holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and is a clinical professor at Fordham University, said, “We all have thousands of photos on our phones, but they disappear into clouds, feeds and obsolete platforms.” But, he added, “the analog-style guest book promises a more deliberate memory object. Even when the recording is stored as a file, the ritual makes it feel materially anchored in something real.”
A rotary phone alongside Super 8 video, Polaroids or even reality TV-style confessional booths does not surprise Malefyt, who called these industry trends “not rejections of technology, but a romanticizing or re-enchantment of the old technology.”
Madyson Frank, who works in wedding content creation, rented a vintage phone from the Other Line for her December 2024 wedding to Brody Frank, the owner of a fencing company, at the Olana, a 19th-century-style venue in Hickory Creek, Texas. While the couple, who are 26 and live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, loved the record in-between moments of the reception they would have otherwise missed, Madison, a wedding content creator, also appreciated that the phone doubled as décor.
The Other Line, which was founded by Jazmyn Tavares, offers marble and crystal phones, with sculptural and retro elements, something Madison said would match the grandness of the wedding venue. “I want these phones to look beautiful at the event,” said Tavares, who sources her individual pieces by calling out-of-state vintage shops or scouring for hours online. She added that she finds herself getting sentimental by what she hears: “I cry every time when couples leave messages for their future selves, or their future kids.”
For Bill Collins, 44, a human resources executive who married Catherine Gambertoglio, 47, a graphic designer in Alameda, Calif., this sentimentality was what inspired their decision to rent a phone from LifeOnRecord, a company led by Alaa El Ghatit, who specializes in Western Electric Model 500 and 1960s phones.
The Collinses captured Bill’s 93-year-old grandmother, along with a childhood friend, the friend who introduced them at Catherine’s birthday party, and a message completely in Kiswahili left by a friend from Kenya. There was also a running joke across several messages throughout the night from friends pretending to be their children, calling them from jail to bail them out.
El Ghatit summed up the experience: “A written guest book often says congratulations.” A voice message is “how someone really sounded when they meant it.”
