Inside a brand new David’s Bridal store in Delray Beach, Florida, a bride-to-be fastidiously taps images on a 65-inch touchscreen, curating a vision board for her wedding. Behind the scenes, an AI system robotically analyzes her selections, constructing a knowledge graph that may match her with vendors, recommend products and generate a customized wedding plan.
For the overwhelmed bride facing 300-plus wedding planning tasks, this AI assistant guarantees to automate the method: suggesting what to do next, reorganizing timelines when plans change and eliminating the necessity to manually update spreadsheets that inevitably break when wedding plans evolve.
That’s the vision David’s Bridal is racing to completely implement with Pearl Planner, its recent beta AI-powered wedding planning platform. For the twice-bankrupt retailer, this technology-driven transformation represents a high-stakes bet that AI can accomplish what traditional retail strategies couldn’t: Survival in an industry where 15,000 stores are projected to shut this 12 months alone.
David’s Bridal is hardly alone within the dramatic and ongoing wave of store closures, bankruptcies and disruptions sweeping through the U.S. retail industry because the mid-2010s. Dubbed the “retail apocalypse,” there have been at the very least 133 major retail bankruptcies and 57,000 store closures between 2018 and 2024. The company narrowly survived liquidation in its second bankruptcy in 2023 when business development company CION Investment Corporation — which has greater than $6.1 billion in assets and a portfolio of 100 firms — acquired substantially all of its assets and invested $20 million in recent funding.
David’s AI-led transformation is driven from the highest down by recent CEO Kelly Cook, who originally joined the corporate as CMO in 2019. Her vision of taking the corporate from “aisle to algorithm” led her to make an unconventional alternative for her leadership team.
Rather than recruiting from throughout the bridal or retail industries, Cook tapped Elina Vilk, a Silicon Valley tech veteran with 25 years of experience in payments and digital technology, to guide the execution as president. “I’m probably not the primary alternative, but that’s by design” Vilk told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview.
Vilk’s background couldn’t be more different from traditional retail leadership: A decade at eBay and PayPal where she served as CMO, experience running small business marketing at Meta with “200 million businesses” and being amongst “the primary digital marketers, ever.” This fresh outsider perspective was precisely what Cook needed to reimagine how a 75-year-old bridal retailer could use AI to create a completely recent business model.
What’s driving David’s Bridal’s transformation
AI was not a part of the DNA of David’s Bridal, so Vilk first faced the challenge of constructing a team from scratch. Her first call was to Mike Bal, a seasoned product leader and technologist, who she worked with as CMO of WooCommerce. Bal, who had spent his profession in technology firms like Automattic (parent company of WordPress.com) and various agencies specializing in AI development, was initially reluctant.
“I’ve been married for nearly 15 years, and my wife’s a wedding and family therapist… she doesn’t like weddings.” Despite his reservations concerning the wedding industry, though, Vilk’s comprehensive vision convinced him. “Elina had this end-to-end plan,” he explains, highlighting the media network, the acquisition of Love Stories TV and the chance to make use of AI for wedding planning.
With a technical leader in place, Vilk faced a key decision. “I could have an entire team and have everybody report back to me. That was an option. Or I could have a pair of individuals report back to me to start out, after which everyone else dotted-line to me, but put them in other organizations, which is precisely what I did.”
By distributing expertise throughout the corporate relatively than making a siloed AI team, Vilk says the strategy paid immediate dividends because technological transformation became everyone’s responsibility relatively than an isolated initiative. Their accomplishments:
- Resource multiplication: Without increasing headcount, Vilk effectively doubled her available talent by accessing developers and resources from multiple departments.
- Cross-company influence: With team members embedded in every leader’s organization, the AI initiative gained strategic representation in any respect levels.
- Accelerated development: The team functioned like a startup throughout the established company, moving quickly by working across traditional departmental boundaries.
- Collaborative engagement: Department heads became natural stakeholders through their team members’ involvement, creating organic buy-in across the organization.
This distributed approach accelerated the company-wide identity shift, transforming David’s from a standard retailer to a technology-enabled wedding platform in lower than a 12 months.
Building the technical foundation
When Mike Bal arrived at David’s Bridal last December, he faced a frightening technical challenge. The company needed to construct a classy AI system with limited resources, a good timeline and no AI experts. Looking at the marriage industry’s reliance on spreadsheets and the communication barriers between brides and vendors, Bal saw a possibility for a fundamentally different approach.
“The biggest problem brides have throughout your complete planning process is getting people to know their vision,” Bal explained. Brides could communicate visually through platforms like Pinterest, but struggled to translate those images into words that vendors, relations and even wedding planners could understand.
Bal’s first breakthrough got here in his architectural approach. While many firms were implementing AI through traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on vector databases — which essentially functions as a search that finds information matching a question — Bal recognized that this wouldn’t capture the nuanced relationships in wedding planning.
Instead, he designed a knowledge graph architecture using Neo4j that also leverages RAG but in a fundamentally different way. Rather than limited search-for-a-match logic, the knowledge graph allows the AI to follow a map to the small print that make up probably the most relevant answer, trace connections between elements, understand that a preference for lace might indicate a bohemian style or that tropical flowers suggest a beach theme.
Working with a single “but sharp” engineer, Bal introduced Replit for rapid prototyping to start out constructing experiences immediately. “We can’t really wait,” he recalls pondering as they faced a possible April launch date while starting work in January. The team soon partnered with dotkonnekt, whose containerized components based on open-source tools like Neo4j and Langflow aligned perfectly with Bal’s architectural vision.
A key innovation was their approach to “memory”, or how the AI system would maintain context across interactions. Rather than using a single large language model (LLM), Pearl Planner orchestrates multiple specialized AI models working in concert, each handling different points of the planning experience.
“Humans still technically process faster than AI,” Bal notes, explaining how they designed the system to trace relationships through the knowledge graph, much like how people make intuitive connections. In testing, he found this approach performed “10x higher in getting the small print in the fitting place” compared to plain RAG methods.
Rather than overwhelming the team with complexity, Bal focused on simplicity, constructing a clean interface that hid the AI’s sophisticated tool use capabilities. He systematically extracted expertise from David’s staff, codifying how elements like dress details and venue preferences relate to wedding styles. This expert knowledge was transformed right into a vision evaluation pipeline that might process images and generate each user-facing aesthetics and detailed backend JSON representations capturing granular preferences.
The result was a system that leverages a proprietary style quiz, taking a gamified approach, allowing users to pick out images across multiple categories, from dresses and venues to entertainment and color palettes. This evaluation extracts not only surface preferences but deeper style insights, creating each a user-facing experience with an external vision board and an in depth backend profile.
This profile informs every subsequent interaction, from content recommendations to task prioritization, all without requiring the bride to manually explain her vision repeatedly. Additionally, the system curates the bride’s aesthetic, which might sometimes be hard to speak when it is perhaps a mix of trends and themes, using that information to create a customized experience from the colours of her Pearl Planner dashboard to really helpful bridal party colours and shortly, wedding web site design and invitation themes.
“Plenty of these brides don’t feel like anybody’s actually listening to them and what they need because everybody has an opinion,” Bal reflected. “Part of it’s they only need anyone to listen and remember what’s necessary to them. That’s a special problem that we’re solving, like a really human problem, but when we got that right and the interactions reflect that, then we did the fitting thing as a place to begin.”
By prioritizing probably the most emotionally resonant features first and step by step expanding capabilities, Bal’s team created an AI assistant with sophisticated function calling that might perform actions like marking tasks complete, reorganizing milestones or generating recommendations. The technology was impressive, but the true achievement was translating technical capabilities into emotional advantages, making brides feel heard and understood in a process typically full of anxiety and miscommunication.
Getting the ROI on AI
Vilk mused: “One thing I’ve learned as a tech person coming into retail is that it’s very efficient, more efficient than the world of tech, mockingly. Every penny is watched in retail. There’s not quite a lot of room to say, ‘Oh, I just wanna play with this AI.’ It really has to have certainly one of the equations on the P&L, will we see a line of sight to much more savings, or will we see a line of sight to even higher growth?”
For David’s, which means constructing entirely recent lines of business with their very own P&L. The Pearl Planner platform is ready up as a definite business unit with its own revenue projections and value allocations, essentially functioning as a startup throughout the established company.
“It’s all concerning the EBITDA” (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), Vilk explains. “We’ve created a separate business unit around Pearl by David’s, which incorporates Pearl Planner because the cornerstone. It’s just about a startup inside the prevailing company.”
This approach allows the corporate to measure the platform’s success independently of the core retail business while making a “very favorable flow through in comparison with retail,” based on Vilk. The revenue model diverges significantly from traditional retail: Instead of focusing solely on dress sales, Pearl Planner generates income through vendor subscriptions, with photographers, venues and other wedding service providers paying monthly fees starting from $20 to $300 for preferential placement and access to brides at the precise moment they need those services.
For AI initiatives elsewhere in the corporate, Vilk employs a phased, risk-managed approach. “For me, it’s a quite simple ROI when it comes to what are we paying today versus what we’re going to be paying with AI,” she said. In areas like marketing, where the corporate spends significant funds on photography and image retouching, AI implementation begins with partial alternative, perhaps 30% of the workload, to validate each cost savings and quality maintenance before expanding.
This cautious approach extends to customer support AI and other implementations. “The cost of the tool cannot exceed the share that you just’re using it for,” Vilk insisted, which establishes a transparent threshold for initial investment. “You can’t just replace all of it and be like, ‘Great, I saved the corporate one million bucks,’ after which lose customers since you haven’t checked the standard first.”
This disciplined approach to AI ROI reflects the truth of implementing cutting-edge technology in a historically thin-margin industry. While tech firms may need the posh of experimental AI initiatives with long-term payoffs, David’s Bridal’s transformation must display tangible returns at each step.
Where they plan to take it
While Pearl Planner is currently in closed beta, David’s Bridal has an ambitious rollout timeline. The public platform launch is scheduled for “early this summer,” with updates on recent features and integrations with partners like MyRegistry, Dynadot, Shutterfly, Google and wedding vendors across the nation.
Vilk’s vision extends beyond just the initial launch, with plans to expand the platform’s capabilities and reach. “In the longer term, we’re going to make that higher and higher,” she said, outlining plans so as to add more sophisticated preference matching based on colours and other wedding elements. Her goal is to create “embedded workflows” that simplify each the bride and vendor experience.
A key upcoming milestone is the launch of Pearl Planner Pro this fall, a separate platform designed specifically for skilled wedding planners. “They have a lot knowledge and a lot experience,” Bal explained. Rather than replacing these professionals, the platform goals to streamline their work and improve client collaboration.
“What we’re going to do for planners is give them this whole workflow, nevertheless it’s going to look very much like your real estate listings,” Vilk said, drawing a parallel to how technology enhanced relatively than eliminated real estate agents. The planner version will allow professionals to curate vendor recommendations for his or her clients relatively than having brides sort through your complete marketplace.
Bal has his sights set on much more natural interactions with the platform. “My ideal is to present everybody the flexibility to call and go on a walk,” he said, envisioning brides managing their planning through voice conversations with their AI assistant. “They can call and talk over with their assistant and ask, ‘Hey, what tests do I actually have about this? Do I actually have anything that covers this? Actually, I need to do that in July, not in August.’ Let’s move it up. You can push that back or eliminate those things.”
Beyond the marriage planner, Bal sees the core platform they’ve built as a foundation for solving other problems across the corporate. “Once you may have all that arrange and you may have your observability to your agents, you may have your API keys in there, the lift to spin up a brand new workflow is pretty low,” he noted. “If we wish to personalize our lifecycle emails now, it’s pretty minimal effort. We’ve already put the inspiration in.”
A blueprint for retail revival
David’s Bridal’s approach offers three insights that might reshape how retailers approach AI transformation. First, their pivot from product to platform demonstrates that business model reinvention, not merely technology adoption, is important for retail survival. By fundamentally changing what they sell, from dresses to vendor connections, they’re creating recent revenue streams that pure e-commerce players can’t easily replicate.
Second, they’re leveraging a incessantly ignored asset of brick-and-mortar retail: The wealthy, high-intent data generated through in-person customer interactions. As Bal noted, “not quite a lot of firms can start with a growth channel at that volume, with that level of intelligence and intent.” While conventional wisdom suggests physical stores are liabilities within the digital age, David’s shows how they will develop into strategic data benefits when properly harnessed.
Finally, their deal with addressing emotional needs, helping brides feel heard and understood in a process where “everybody has an opinion,” represents a fundamentally different approach to AI implementation. Rather than merely automating functional tasks, they’re using technology to meet emotional needs which have all the time existed but never been adequately served.
As retail continues its painful transformation, with tens of 1000’s of stores closing annually, these insights suggest that survival may depend less on competing with e-commerce giants on their terms, and more on reimagining what business traditional retailers are truly in, what unique data benefits they possess and what emotional needs they will uniquely address. For David’s Bridal, an organization that has twice faced extinction, their transformation represents not only a technological upgrade but a whole reimagining of their role in the client journey, a lesson that will prove invaluable for retailers across all categories.
