First of all, David’s Bridal is alive and well. And with the latest step in its tech makeover, it hopes to be thriving soon.
Fresh off a strategic pivot to an “asset-light,” tech-powered model, the legacy wedding dress retailer officially tapped Shopify for a new integration that allows it to “unify its e-commerce and in-store operations” with shoppable screens, enhanced checkout experience, and streamlined omnichannel inventory, according to a company release. Shoppers can also view and purchase the full David’s catalog from in-store screens and have their picks shipped directly to their doorstep.
“We’ve been in existence for 75 years; we’ve dressed over 100 million women in that time frame and so we’ve captured a lot of information on brides and bridesmaids and mothers over the years,” David’s Bridal CEO Kelly Cook told Retail Brew on a Zoom call while navigating a busy airport. “The No. 1 emotion a bride feels for 18 months is anxiety…She gets proposed to, and she’s happy for about 15 minutes, and then panic sets in…It was clearly evident to us that we needed to rethink the technology that she’s interfacing with.”
A key part of rethinking that technology has also been streamlining inventory with “tens of thousands of dresses.” Cook said, adding as part of its new Shopify tech, the retailer is “quintupling” its number of dresses online.
“[The bride] ends up buying 18 and 20 outfits between this time frame because she needs outfits for everything…but we simply didn’t have enough SKUs,” Cook said. “Traffic to our website is up 42% YoY but our conversion rates are plummeting. Some just didn’t have enough products to sell, so we got a drop ship of over 50 companies waiting to get into our e-commerce marketplace, because we have so much traffic, and when you’ve got 90% of the brides hitting your funnel, the 2.7 million wedding vendors that are out there serving those brides want to partner with us, because we’re the only source of first-party data out there.”
While the digital upgrades could make the shopping process a lot more seamless, will the company be able to regain consumer trust, especially given that the retailer has been through more than one bankruptcy in recent years? Cook said it’s different this time.
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“The first difference is our entire growth strategy for the company is built around AI and being asset light,” she said. “Let’s take the example of couture. An asset-light approach to couture is partnering with somebody that does it, versus setting up the internal mechanisms to produce it ourselves. It gets us to the market faster. It’s an asset-light approach developing a tool that takes a bride’s Pinterest board that she’s been building for five or 10 years…and using an AI analyzer, which is something that we built that’s in production, that imports all the data from her Pinterest board and puts it into our wedding book on our side. Before, that would be a survey that she’d have to fill out and then the survey has to be downloaded, and it’s just cumbersome.”
Another major difference between 2023 and now was how the operational expenses were used to run the company. “We are monetizing every single aspect of our business, including our vertically integrated supply chain,” Cook said. “We have 36 design and production centers all over the world. Those centers are in China and outside of China—like we have Myanmar, we’ve got Sri Lanka, we’ve got Vietnam, and the list goes on and on. Starting at the end of last year with Trump talking about his anticipated tariff activity, we started moving production out of China ahead of time, and by July of this year, we will be 100% out.”
She added that this pivot made it so that companies were now approaching David’s Bridal to produce their dresses for them.
Beyond the tech innovations, the company has also tapped designers like Marchesa for luxury collaborations, introduced menswear, and launched concept stores called Diamonds & Pearls by David’s that offer a more curated experience.
Will the collective changes and partnerships work? Only time will tell, but Cook, who celebrates her 31st wedding anniversary this year, is confident. “I’m a very lucky woman,” she said.