Good morning. David’s Bridal, America’s largest wedding-dress retailer, is looking to AI to make the biggest pivot in its 76-year-old history. 

The chain, which had solely been a purveyor of wedding dresses, has transitioned to serving brides during their entire planning process with AI, Kelly Cook, the chief executive of the Pennsylvania-based company, recently told me.

The strategy, which the company dubbed “aisle to algorithm,” kicked off last year under Cook’s direction. Put another way, it’s about growing David’s in an “asset-light” way, one that serves brides by connecting them directly with vendors, Cook said.

For David’s, its big AI bet needs to pay off. “This is a one-hundred-eighty degree pivot,” Cook said.

The company filed for bankruptcy in April 2023, citing inflation and difficulty recovering from pandemic-related losses. It was later bought out of bankruptcy by CION Investment Corporation, a business development and asset management firm. The company had previously restructured in November 2018.

‘We have the actual brides’

There are a few components to the strategy: Pearl Planner, an AI-based wedding planning tool for brides, and Pearl Connect, an AI-powered platform for wedding vendors. While both tools rely on AI, the real differentiator is the customer data that powers them, according to Elina Vilk, the company’s president and chief business officer.

“We have the actual brides coming into our system,” Vilk said. “When they book their appointment, when they commerce with us on David’s Bridal dot-com, when they go through our surfaces, they’re sharing a lot of information that is unique to them.”

The idea is David’s Bridal can build upon its relationship with brides—and the data it collects from them—to better connect brides with vendors hoping to sell their services at the moment brides are ready to buy.

Building the tech and people stack

Supporting a major strategy shift requires a major tech platform shift. That began in 2022 with using AI for marketing and creating content, to eventually using AI for its operations, Cook said. The company had also been using machine learning for match and promotion planning.

To power Pearl Planner, David’s built its own agentic AI orchestration system with a knowledge graph at its core to enable a personalized experience for each user. The company’s AI agent, Pearl, combines first-party data, proprietary insights and research, and real-world anecdotes from in-store stylists who have worked with brides.

Pearl can automatically change wedding dates and book vendors or appointments. When a couple changes their wedding date, Pearl can help adjust the planning timeline and related to-do’s around the new date, the company said. For vendors and appointments, it helps couples identify relevant options and coordinate next steps. The company uses a variety of AI models to power its agent, and plans to integrate with Meta’s Muse agent, Vilk added.

To support its engineering team, which consists of less than ten full-time developers and some outside technical help, David’s has invested in agentic coding tools. “What would have taken one hundred-plus people before, we were able to do with just tens,” Vilk said. “There’s no way we could have achieved anything like this even three years ago.”

As David’s continues developing its AI tools, it’s adding new “embedded tasks” inside Pearl, such as a budgeting capability based on where the wedding will be held. “We’re maximizing token usage probably every day,” Vilk said.

In it for the long haul

Since launching its new strategy, Vilk said David’s has seen a threefold increase in customer engagement, and a 26-fold increase in number of users. The company said AI has amplified its strategy, allowing it to accomplish four years of work in 18 months.

Rather than setting aside new budget for the strategy, Cook said David’s has kept its investment flat year-over-year while scaling innovation and evolving the company. “We just reallocated it to the newer strategy, so there wasn’t that much incrementality. We moved it around to optimize Pearl,” she added.

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