Wedding planning can be a complicated, stressful experience that often spans more than a year and involves coordinating multiple merchants. In recognition, David’s Bridal has shifted its CX strategy to extend its services beyond dress shopping and into the entire planning process.
The average bride hires 14 different vendors for her wedding day, according to Elina Vilk, chief business officer at David's Bridal. Brides will likely meet with three times that number of vendors during the leadup as they try to find the best provider for their needs.
David’s Bridal aims to smooth out the experience through Pearl by David’s, an app that helps brides plan their wedding with a digital checklist to keep dates and deadlines in order. The company launched the app in January 2023 as an all-in-one planning tool.
Vilk, who joined David’s Bridal last month, is upgrading the app to do even more, with new features slated to go live in 2025. Vilk was charged with leading the growth and development of Pearl as the retailer continues to rebuild its business following its April 2023 bankruptcy.
Vilk said Pearl, and by extension David’s Bridal, can create better experiences for brides by evolving beyond a planning tool to become a digital assistant that offers inspiration, simplifies scheduling and provides timely reminders.
“The way we're enhancing the experience is moving from being a checklist to being a copilot,” Vilk told CX Dive.
What is Pearl?
Pearl, a mobile app for wedding planning, delivers four major features. Brides can start using the app by answering a few questions about the kind of wedding they want. Pearl uses this information to create a vision board that offers advice on topics from dresses to floral arrangements.
From there, brides can create a checklist to help track what needs to be done and when. The app has options to design a wedding registry, including room-by-room inspiration for gift ideas, as well as templates for building a wedding website.
Pearl also ties directly into David’s Bridal’s loyalty program, Diamond. The two apps share login information to make swapping between the two easy, according to Vilk. Many vendors on Pearl also offer discounts for Diamond members.
Making booking vendors as easy as restaurant reservations
One of the most important considerations when upgrading a piece of software like Pearl is understanding how new technology impacts customers, according to Vilk, who comes from a B2B background, with more than 25 years spent at roles in tech companies including Hootsuite, WooCommerce and Meta. New tech that just looks more elegant isn’t very useful — it needs to improve the actual user experience.
With this in mind, the first thing Vilk did after joining David’s Bridal was map out the customer journey to understand the pain points brides face during the planning process. From there, Vilk pinpointed the biggest points of friction and began thinking about how Pearl could help.
“What are the different things she does at different points in time, and how do we enhance that experience from A to Z?” Vilk said.
One of these pain points was vendor booking. While Pearl can currently help brides find vendors and track meetings, Vilk sees room for improvement.
Appointment bookings are one of the upgrades slated to launch in 2025, according to Vilk. The goal is that brides can not only discover vendors through Pearl, but also use the app to set up meetings and add them to the calendar.
“It really shouldn't be any different than getting a reservation for a restaurant,” Vilk said.
Improving the local experience
Pearl aims to improve customer experience for third-party vendors, too.
Weddings are very personal and usually very local. A bride in Florida may be thinking about beaches and seek out vendors ready to cater to a sandy wedding, while a Midwestern bride likely has a completely different aesthetic in mind.
“National appeal is important, but it's also about the local and distinct thing I'm doing in a specific city,” Vilk said. “There's going to be local restaurants, local businesses, local photographers, etc., that understand that city better than anyone else does.”
However, many of these local businesses lack the budget to offer their clients a great experience from discovery to the wedding day. Pearl wants to fill that gap, according to Vilk.
“I think when looking at the pain points for the brides, I'm also looking at the pain points for the businesses,” Vilk said. “How can we start to connect the two dots? How do we become the Match.com for brides and businesses?”
Wedding planning involves far more than finding and meeting with vendors, and there are other ways Pearl aims to assist brides.
David’s Bridal is exploring using AI to suggest due dates for different tasks, adding features to help brides manage their budgets, and expanding its digital marketplace. For now, Vilk is prioritizing solutions for the biggest pain points David’s Bridal customers are facing.
“There are so many things I want to solve that I see in the process,” Vilk said. “I'll think, ‘I wish I could just tackle this right now,’ but you have to prioritize, and you have to say ‘no’ to a lot of really good ideas.”
