Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more
Inside a new David’s Bridal store in Delray Beach, Florida, a bride-to-be carefully taps images on a 65-inch touchscreen, curating a vision board for her wedding. Behind the scenes, an AI system automatically analyzes her selections, building a knowledge graph that will match her with vendors, recommend products and generate a personalized wedding plan.
For the overwhelmed bride facing 300-plus wedding planning tasks, this AI assistant promises to automate the process: suggesting what to do next, reorganizing timelines when plans change and eliminating the need to manually update spreadsheets that inevitably break when wedding plans evolve.
That’s the vision David’s Bridal is racing to fully implement with Pearl Planner, its new 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 close this year alone.
David’s Bridal is hardly alone in the dramatic and ongoing wave of store closures, bankruptcies and disruptions sweeping through the U.S. retail industry since the mid-2010s. Dubbed the “retail apocalypse,” there were at 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 more than $6.1 billion in assets and a portfolio of 100 companies — acquired substantially all of its assets and invested $20 million in new funding.David’s AI-led transformation is driven from the top down by new CEO Kelly Cook, who originally joined the company as CMO in 2019. Her vision of taking the company from “aisle to algorithm” led her to make an unconventional choice for her leadership team.
Rather than recruiting from within 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 lead the execution as president. “I’m probably not the first choice, 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 …