A 76-year-old bridal chain, twice through bankruptcy, now bets big on algorithms. David’s Bridal’s leaders see brides not just buying dresses, but steering a $100 billion wedding machine. Elina Vilk, chief business officer, pulls no punches. CEOs fixated on AI’s quick payback? They’re missing the point.
Vilk joined in 2024 from tech stints at PayPal, Hootsuite, and Meta. She wasn’t the obvious pick for a dress seller. Yet under CEO Kelly Cook, the company launched ‘Aisle to Algorithm’ in 2025. This shift builds an asset-light model: Pearl, an AI wedding planner; a retail media network; expansions into menswear, swimwear, accessories. They snapped up Love Stories TV for content. Integrations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot bring agentic AI to shopping searches.
The bride drives it all. ‘A bride is a super-influencer,’ Vilk says. ‘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.’ (Fortune)
Pearl handles those 300 tasks. It finds vendors, books services, curates looks. Vilk frames it carefully. ‘She, Pearl AI, she understands weddings really well, and she can help you with any task,’ she told ClickZ. ‘AI can’t marry your husband. Not yet, at least.’ First-party data fuels it, mapping the unseen mental load of planning.
AI seeps into operations. Merchandisers use Anthropic’s Claude for trend research, speeding adaptations. Images? AI colorizes dresses in 10 shades, ditching manual photos. Labor costs drop. No more shooting every hue.
But here’s Vilk’s core warning. Don’t chase AI’s standalone ROI. ‘I don’t think of AI as the ROI vehicle,’ she told Fortune. ‘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.’
Take the colorization example. ‘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,’ Vilk explains. ‘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.’
Selective. Brutally so. ‘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 mindset shift starts at the top. Cook’s vision cascades down. Merch teams now lean on Claude daily. The company migrated to Shopify in nine months—a feat that usually drags years. (Shopify) All revenue pillars—merchandising, marketing, e-commerce—report to Vilk. New CTO scales AI; operations chief Heather Braddock brings retail chops.
Results? After one year of Aisle to Algorithm, unprecedented growth. New launches: Travel by David’s, Diamonds & Pearls boutiques, Marchesa couture, Vera Wang exclusivity. Partners like Sezzle, Generation Tux, Alex + Ani. Thousands of vendors onboarded. Cook calls it extraordinary. (Morningstar)
Yet broader doubts linger. AI hype clashes with reality. Thousands of CEOs report no employment or productivity bumps from AI, reviving old economic paradoxes. (Fortune) Workers say it strains workflows—email time doubles, deep focus drops. Gartner’s take: Fewer than 30% of CEOs satisfied with AI returns. MIT finds 95% of pilots yield no P&L impact. (Forbes) Spending doubles anyway.
David’s Bridal sidesteps the trap. Vilk’s tech background spots retail’s efficiency edge over pure tech. They demand P&L line-of-sight before committing. Phased rollouts. No blind faith. Post-bankruptcy twice, they can’t afford flops.
Bank of America flags AI as double-edged. It might cannibalize profits. (Fortune) Anthropic’s Dario Amodei warns of bankruptcy if growth lags forecasts. Compute bets could bankrupt even giants.
David’s pushes on. Agentic shopping in ChatGPT. Retail media booms. A docuseries next. From dress racks to data powerhouse.
Vilk’s advice echoes wide. Obsess over processes, not pixels. AI as accelerator. Measure initiatives whole. Defer the rest. Retail’s thin margins punish fools. David’s Bridal survives by listening.
Brides plan. Algorithms assist. ROI follows—if you let it.
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