How David’s Bridal and Shopify are driving a new era of bridal retail with technological innovation
As brides and other shoppers seek more modern shopping experiences, David’s Bridal is seizing the opportunity to evolve into a tech-driven retailer that meets a new generation’s expectations for digital, in-store and omnichannel experiences. While David’s Bridal has served brides for 75 years, recent years have seen the legacy brand increasingly focus on modernization and transformation.
“David’s Bridal has around 90% of all brides in the U.S. entering its ecosystem at some point,” said Elina Vilk, president and Chief Business Officer at David’s Bridal. “When you think about this from the standpoint of ‘you’ve got the audience, what can you do with an audience’ versus from the standpoint of ‘you’ve got dresses that sell, how do you sell more dresses,’ you start with a different problem as our baseline.
“The bride is the pivotal decision-maker in the wedding, and she’s becoming the pivotal decision-maker in her household,” she continued. “Our vision is that we don’t just need to get her the dress — we need to help her get every aspect of what she needs for a wedding and every aspect of what her guests will need. So we needed to take a look at our entire infrastructure for everything we’re doing to be able to support that vision.”
Supporting the modern bride by evolving the customer journey
As part of this transformation, David’s Bridal has made several big swings. It launched its retail media network, Pearl Media Network, last December, and also acquired Love Stories TV, which publishes video content on CTV and social media.
More recently, the retailer launched Pearl Planner, an AI-powered planning tool with more than 300 touchpoints, in August. Along with a 24/7 AI assistant, it includes registry connections, curated vendor recommendations, dynamic timelines and seamless integration with David’s Bridal for in-store appointments.
“Inspiration, shopping and planning — they are all journeys the bride has,” Vilk said. “It’s not a linear shopping journey, and these journeys all have to intertwine with each other all the way through. We want to fill this gap between inspiration and convenience, and to create that experience, we needed digital to come into that in a completely different way.”
Taking an endless aisle approach to make dress shopping seamless
Another key to David Bridal’s evolution is its new concept store, Diamonds & Pearls. This curated, tech-driven boutique blends the hospitality of a high-end boutique with the retailer’s recent technology, AI and content innovations.
According to research commissioned by Shopify and published by EY, 57% of consumers want to see, touch and feel items before they buy them, and 38% buy items online and then collect them in-store. This kind of seamless, cross-channel shopping experience is even more essential when it comes to bridal shopping.
“The typical bridal journey is about 18 months long with hundreds of tasks, so it’s not impulse shopping,” said Ray Reddy, vp, retail at Shopify. “Ninety percent of David’s Bridal customers want to be in a physical store, but they also want access to everything. The future of retail is seamlessly blending the convenience of online with the tangible aspect of shopping in-store.”
By working with Shopify, David’s Bridal is creating more flexible, dynamic and elevated omnichannel and in-store point-of-sale experiences. At the heart of this pivot is David’s Bridal’s new endless aisle experience, a wedding industry first. In-store, Shopify-powered digital touchscreens let guests shop the retailer’s full catalog, purchase at the point-of-sale and ship directly to their homes.
“A big part of our focus is removing the artificial barriers between how customers want to shop and how retailers serve them,” said Reddy. “The endless aisle has infinite shelf space without the infinite real estate costs, meaning stores have the availability of David’s entire catalog.
“These touchscreens don’t just show more products — they’re eliminating the anxiety of wondering, ‘what if there’s something better that I haven’t seen?” he continued. “That’s a big reason why this endless aisle is resonating with customers, specifically at David’s Bridal.”
Vilk echoed these sentiments, noting how choosing a wedding dress is correlated with other decisions, such as the type of wedding or venue. Having a unified view of a customer’s shopping history, wedding aesthetic, venue and other data points, as enabled by Shopify, better equips the retailer’s stylists, dubbed Dream Makers, to assist the bride once she’s in a store.
“High levels of personalization and AI — fit, things like that — are going to all continue to get built into our endless aisle, as well as built into our site and into Pearl Planner,” Vilk said. “We tell the stylist all of these data points so they’re ready for the bride when she comes in, and it’s a high-touch, personalized experience.
“We need to remove anxiety at every step and make dress shopping a delightful experience,” she continued.
Unveiling a high-touch, tech-forward shopping experience with unified platforms
Beyond the endless aisle experience, David’s Bridal’s partnership with Shopify has unlocked other opportunities through unified commerce.
“Rather than just adding more integrations or digitizing their existing systems, David’s Bridal took the path of creating a new, unified digital foundation — one system to handle everything,” Reddy said.
“That’s the kind of foundational thinking that transforms a business,” he added. “This is retail transformation done right: It’s solving customer friction and building a foundation for the future.”
For instance, moving to Shopify has allowed David’s Bridal to simplify its inventory management. With one centralized inventory, the David’s Bridal team has a more accurate picture of the stock on hand, what is allocated and what is sold, allowing the team to make more accurate inventory projections and see less cancellations as a result. Beyond streamlining operations, the centralized, asset-lite backend reduces costs and further unlocks agility to better support dropshipping, exclusive vendor partnerships and more personalized shopping experiences.
Vilk also said she hopes to better activate David’s Bridal’s Diamond Loyalty program, which boasts almost 3 million members. Through Shopify, the goal is to help loyalty members earn points faster and more seamlessly, even connecting different touchpoints as well as planning and purchasing actions (even via Pearl Planner).
“Shopify was able to think through all our requirements and our vision, and they stood out because they have such a great ecosystem with all of these other applications that we can connect to,” Vilk said, pointing to everything from David’s Bridal’s marketplace to stylist appointment bookings. “It is giving us the flexibility to dream bigger and build out our vision of the future further than where we’ve been before.”
As other legacy brands look to follow David’s Bridal’s lead to modernize and improve operational efficiency, Shopify’s Reddy recommended focusing on customer experience — and how technology can help.
“What’s good for one retailer may not make sense for another retailer, so you need to stay focused on what customer problem you’re solving,” he said. “Modernizing retail isn’t about doing the same things digitally — it’s about thinking about things that weren’t possible before and are possible now. The smartest retailers are able to do that.”
Sponsored by Shopify