After years working in marketing positions at tech companies such as PayPal, Hootsuite, and Meta, Elina Vilk admits she wasn’t the most traditional hire for David’s Bridal. But when she came on as chief business officer in 2024, the 76-year-old dress seller was at the precipice of a major strategic shift that would require someone with Vilk’s expertise.
In 2025, the company launched its “Aisle to Algorithm” program with the goal of turning David’s Bridal into an “asset-light, AI-powered business model” with a range of new offerings, including a wedding planning platform, an expanded retail media network, and an expansion into new categories such as menswear, accessories, and swimwear.
- David’s Bridal also announced an integration with Open AI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot agentic AI platforms to ensure the brand shows up where customers are searching.
Vilk has been at the forefront of this transformation, so Retail Brew sat down with her to talk about what it’s like to witness (and spearhead) a company’s AI transition.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Innovation seems to have really accelerated at David’s Bridal recently. What inspired this pivot toward technology investment?
A bride is a super-influencer. A bride is influencing over 300 moments that lead up to that walk down the aisle in an 18-month period. So you think about that: They’re making 300 decisions, and there’s hundreds of transactions that happen in that decision. The wedding planning marketplace is a 100-plus-billion-dollar opportunity. We were only really tapping into the dress sale, and we actually have the opportunity to think about the bride in a much more holistic way and build out an ecosystem for her. So we built the first-ever AI that plans your whole wedding for you called [Pearl by David’s], and that was the beginning of it. Since then, we’ve been doing everything wrapped around the bride, from the moment she thinks about content—with our acquisition of Love Stories TV—all the way down to the way she buys the dress.
Can you talk about some of the process changes required to make something like this happen?
It had to be a mindset shift organizationally. It started with our CEO, Kelly Cook, coming in with a bold vision, and then really bringing it across the teams.
[Now] it’s all the way down to our merchandising team and having one of our lead merchants now using Claude every day, thinking about the applications that we work with, how we do research, how we shift trend much quicker than we have before.
With David’s Bridal investing so much in AI technology, how is the company thinking about ROI?
I don’t think of AI as the ROI vehicle. AI is a tool that’s now embedded in everything…It’s about changing your process every which way and form to derive a better ROI from what you’re already doing.
It’s not so much…“What’s the discrete investment ROI of AI?” It’s really about the specific initiative you’re driving and what role AI has to play to accelerate those initiatives or to drive better efficiency.
So we shouldn’t necessarily be worried about a direct ROI when it comes to AI, but can you tell us a little more about the potential cost savings?
Let’s talk about images. We’re using AI right now to help us with color. We have 10 colors on some dresses. We used to have to manually photograph all these colors. Now we can change the colors with AI colorization. So I’m not looking at the cost of this AI tool, but I’m looking at this amount spent on labor before [the AI tool and asking:] Now am I spending less? So it’s not about the cost of the AI itself. It’s about the cost of the initiative and the ROI of the initiative.
AI doesn’t make sense for everything…There’s many things we’re not using AI on because we did the analysis, and maybe it’ll make sense five years from now, but it doesn’t make sense today…And if AI is able to help us solve the cost side, great. If it’s not, we’re not going to do it.
This report was originally published by Retail Brew.
