Inside David's Bridal's post-bankruptcy turnaround

The best proxy is if we think about how people were talking about AI

six months to even a year ago and how people were using it in daily life I

think the same evolution is going to happen here right where most people didn't

have any subscription to any AI tools let's say a year ago and that's massively

shifted to today I think it's the same thing is going to be true with a

gentick commerce where it's going to feel like nothing is changing and then

all at once it'll feel like it's been here all along. That's Juan

Pilarano Rendon, Chief Marketing Officer at Swap, our sponsor on this

episode of the Modern Retail Podcast. Later in the show, Custom Intelligence

talks with Juan about the rise of a gentick commerce its education phase and

what retailers should keep in mind.

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Welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast. It's our show that covers the ways the

retail industry is changing and modernizing. I'm Special Projects Editor

Melissa Daniels here with Senior Reporter Gabby Barco. Gabby, how are you today?

I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing well. Spring has sprung and I'm

excited for so many new things we're doing this time of year. You know we're

getting ready for the Modern Retail Marketing Summit next month, so I'm

excited about that. But today I'm really excited about I guess we have on the

podcast who has been someone I've talked to for some time and I was thrilled to

get it for the show. Are you familiar with David's bridal, Gabby? I am indeed.

Yes, I am. It's also wedding season, so very timely. It is wedding season. This

was timely. Have you been a bridesmaid before? Yes, I have. But like very to

like very chill brides who are like just go whatever dress you want and show up

that day, which is the best case scenario. Yeah, that's been my experience too. I

also feel like I've missed the millennial right of passage of going like on an

insane bachelor at trip. Like that didn't happen for me. No, my friends were like,

let's go campaign. We just have to. Yeah. No, but I hear so many horror stories

that I'm always like, okay, well, that's not me. But no, I do love, I love like just

reading and following just like the wedding industry because I just find it so

fascinating. But David's bridal is such a fascinating company because it's

sort of, you know, the face of the American wedding industry. Yes, yes. I mean,

it is arguably the longest standing retailer in that industry, at least from a

bridal gown standpoint. You know, it's been the national chain for bridal gowns,

as well as bridesmaids and other formal wear for a really long time. But the company had a

really hard time beginning in the 2010s. It wasn't modernizing and there was a lot of issues.

I think maybe with its footprint and its assortment that that weren't squaring. So the company

filed for chapter 11 in November 2018. And then again in April 2023. And then since the

spring of 2024, the company's turnaround has been led by Kelly Cook. She's a long-time

retailing, marketing executive. You swerve for brands like Pier One, Kmart, DSW. And we have

her on the show today to talk about, you know, running a brand turnaround and the challenges involved

in that. Yeah, I'm excited to listen to your segment specifically because she has such a

non-traditional trajectory to see how you don't really see a lot of marketers that move over

to this position. But, you know, given the history of David's bridal, it makes sense that they want

that sort of like CMO lens maybe to lead the charge because marketing just informs so much of

what this category in this industry is constantly doing, right?

Yeah, that's a really good observation. And she said that herself, you know, that the

trajectory is rare to land in the CEO role from a marketing background. But when you look at

some of the strategies that they've deployed over the last year, a lot of it is really around brand,

right? They have a long-form show called Breaking Bridal that they put out. They're doing a lot

more with social media. They launched a new affiliate program this January. And they're also doing

a lot with AI, both within their own workflows. And of course, on, you know, the web page,

the customer experience. And we got a fun little scoop in this recording that they're getting

their product pages integrated into chat GPT. So when brides or bridesmaids or people looking for

formal wear are using a chat GPT service to look up gowns, they'll be more quicker directed to

David's products. Yeah, that makes sense, especially because a lot of brides are using AI right now

to sort of put together budgets and look up, you know, whether it's gowns or inspiration or

anything else for their wedding. So you do want to be at the forefront there. So I'm excited to hear

what they're doing on the AI front. I'm curious, was there anything else on the marketing channel

front that she said that they're rethinking that maybe it worked four or five years ago,

but now we're realizing like we need to modernize a little bit more whether it's, I mean,

the fact that affiliate is new to them is kind of surprising because it's something that a lot of

friends have been doing for years now. So yeah, any other examples? Yeah, that's a really good

question. I feel like one of the most tangible things we talked about is how that manifests in

store, right? I think as shoppers, we've all had a lot of experiences where we go in a store,

we see something we like, oh, they don't have our size. You know, on the bridal side, it is made

to order in a lot of cases. Sometimes people are going there and buying their wedding gown off

the floor, but vast majority of the cases, you're ordering it. And so one of the things that they've

been able to do that they piloted in some of their stores is basically like an in store iPad,

like that can help people find something that maybe is an in store or complete their look. So say

you're there picking out your dress for prom, you can also then order all of the other things that

you want to get with your dress, right? I'm just doing that from in store, kind of like an endless

aisle. And I thought that was really interesting because she's already in your store. So how are you,

you know, taking the the initiative there to make sure that she's getting the most that you can

provide with for her at that time? So I think they're doing some really interesting things in store.

And I'm curious to see what happens next. Yeah, I'm really excited to listen to this, especially

because it's so timely and they had a few goes now at reinventing themselves. So I'm excited to

see what Kelly's vision looks like. Yeah, yeah, she's great with a metaphor too. So a lot of good,

a lot of good one-liners in here. It was a great conversation. So yeah, stay tuned after the break

to listen. All right, Kelly cook from David's bridal. So folks, whether or not they've been

married are probably familiar with David's bridal just being a legacy brand, right? And you know,

more recently in the world of retail, there were headlines around the company's second bankrupt

C, you know, that it had filed this this century. Just for purposes of table setting, you know,

what's the status of the company right now? How are things? It's going well, Melissa. We are fully

engaged in our transformation of aisle to algorithm. Our 5,000 dream makers that are at the company

are on fire for serving her and implementing our new path forward. It's a very, very exciting

time at David's for sure. Awesome. Well, we're definitely going to get into some of the strategies

that are showing growth and that are getting customers their their dream gowns and beyond.

But I really want to go behind the scenes with your journey because you were the CMO at David's

bridal before taking the CEO mantle just about a year ago. So when that was your transition,

when you were taking that CEO role, well, we're some of the first challenges that you had to tackle.

You're right. I was CMO and then I became CMO and head of IT and then over finance and then

finally CEO and the biggest turnaround we had to make was, you know, as you mentioned, the company

had filed in 23. It did restructuring in 19 and it was tough, you know, it was a tough environment

inside and we needed to really understand how to transform this company into a machine that

delivers value for its three key constituencies, which are our customers, our employees and our

shareholders. And it was really an amazing opportunity at this level to sort of reset along with

the leadership, what aisle to algorithm was and is now. And it was it was an opportunity to really

sort of understand what were we good at? What did we do? Well, how do we optimize? How do we

modernize? And then quite frankly, we didn't have to look that far, Melissa, because brides were

already telling us what they wanted us to do. It was just a matter of putting that together.

And it was when you're sitting around a table and you're talking about algorithm and you're

building this plan and you're like, okay, this is it. You know, we're doing it. It can get a

little scary and I told the team, I said, look, sometimes when you're in a dark place, you think

you've been buried, but you've actually been planted. And this is our opportunity to plant

and bloom and come up with, you know, a new model for David's that shares what we're good at with

the world. Yeah. What does that term encompass for the company aisle to algorithm? What sort of

strategy is encompassed in there? Yeah, that's a great question. It's really centered around the

vision of David's becoming the largest AI-nabled retail media and planning marketplace serving

weddings and beyond. That's really what aisle to algorithm is about. And it's underpinned by building

a company that is profitable, that not just survives, but thrives as well.

And that nowhere in that sentence did you say selling dresses, which is, I think, what David's

title is best known for. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. You know, it's interesting. You

know, when we, when we really sat down, you know, the thing, the mindset was, let's be somebody

shot at whiskey and not everybody's cup of tea, right? And what we're good at, that shot at

whiskey is brides and serving her. And we really had three key strengths that we, that we analyzed.

One was we had incredible brand trust. That's awesome. And we had brand trust with 90% of all brides

coming into the David's funnel. I mean, most companies would kill for those lights. Amazing, right?

The second thing that we knew we were good at is we can design and produce some of the most

gorgeous brands in the world and gowns and dresses in the world. And the third thing that we knew

we could do is we could provide exceptional value. So whether that is vendors, partners, our brides,

prom, graduation, mothers of the bride, it didn't matter. We knew we had those things together.

So we had to build around that and build a strategy that would, again, return this company to

to profitability, but protect the word trust. That is the number one you were used to describe

David's from all the partners that we have as trust. So it was very important that we protected that.

So what have been some of the, you know, weaknesses or challenges? When you talk about the

strength, you've got that brand trust and a fairly large audience, you know, coming to David's

online or in store. But what were the things that you're like, no, this isn't working that we either

have to drop or reinvent? Yeah. So that's a great question because there were some, there were some

pivots along the way for sure. So one of the things that I learned myself is that we had laid out a

pretty aggressive product roadmap for aisle to algorithm starting April 1st. And it was aggressive.

And when I say aggressive and you're, your, your listeners will definitely fill this in their bones

when I say this, but we didn't have one bolder project in IT. And a lot of people know what that

means. That's like a big area project, right? We didn't have one. We had six in 25. That, that is a

tremendous amount of work, not only on our IT partners, but on our business partners as well

in finance and business cases and, and building out, you know, the change management aside from

just building boulders. So one of my lessons learned is about two and a half quarters then,

I'm like, oh, let's slow it down. Let's pivot. And we gave ourselves a little bit of a break to just

take a pause and then push some, a few of those out into 27. So that, that was probably the

biggest thing. The second thing I learned was really just around talent, you know, talent is

everything. Well, it really is. And, you know, talent's kind of like, you know, buying a key

of furniture, you know, if you picked the wrong part, nothing fits, and somebody ends up crying,

right? So, you know, you really, it's everything. And, and it was interesting watching the transition

at David's with talent. And, and it's, it was such a big lesson for all of us in at David's that

we are now rolling out a new training program, hiring program, and recruiting program,

starting in April of this year, because we learn some really good lessons. I think the,

the headline is, you know, change management is not for the week of heart. It's just not, not,

not, not with large-scale transformation. It just isn't. And it's hard, you know, it's hard work.

And I think if I was going to give you one final lesson, Melissa, it was really just

celebrating more of the small wins, doing that a little bit more. I, you know, I'm on a quest to

do that much, much more in 26. Yeah. Yeah. I look forward to seeing what's in store for that.

There's a lot to unpack there. I'm almost looking at it in two buckets where one is sort of

the actual strategies and tactics that are being built and the other's culture, right? And all of

these things are changing and growing simultaneously and kind of having to come together.

You know, and when you talk about the boulders for IT, I feel like given this charge of being

an AI-driven company that a lot was falling on them, what are some of the, you know, tools or

services that that team has stood up that are now paying off in this era of Davis? That's a wonderful,

I love this question because it gets, I'm able to brag about a lot of the people of Davis.

So, so, so one thing is we, we had to simultaneously move our data to the cloud,

modernize our infrastructure and launch Shopify, both in ecom and POS. I mean, that is not,

you were literally feeling at the gas tank, changing the tires by the cars, maybe 80 miles down the

road. And we, we found an incredible IT leader. His name is Scott Sager. He is so good and it's,

it's his attitude as well as his competency. Melissa, and I would say, attitude before aptitude

right now, like I think we can train aptitude if that's missing, but attitude is everything and

the willingness to stand up from front of a group and go, look, if cauliflower can become pizza,

anything can happen. We can do this, you know, we can, we can do this. And so, we implemented

Shopify and our new cattour stores that's doing incredibly well for us. We launched Shopify Canada,

which we didn't have commercial, commercial Canada, Canadian website. So, we launched that,

you know, we've successfully moved our data to the cloud. We modernized our processes at David's

using AI, which has really been transformative for sure. And I, you know, I can provide that

detail if you're interested, but it's just been an incredible journey for our IT partners. They've

done an incredible job, you know, really, really good job for them. Yeah. Have you had to sort of

soup things up and it sounds like this was happening, probably the Shopify integration probably helped,

but becoming more omnichannel while still really focusing on growth of e-commerce. Because from

my perspective, it seems like there was maybe sort of really two arms of the business and you've

maybe tried to bring those together a little more. Yes. And so, I can give you a couple of examples of

that in context of building a building, a better and more profitable driving company. You know,

when we launched Shopify in our diamonds and pearls couture stores, we put smart screens on the

walls and that allowed a bride to go up to the screen and see everything in her pearl planning

journey. And she could actually shop, bridesmaids with that, the planning vision that she already

has for wedding right there on the screen. And because the Shopify platform enabled in LaSalle,

she could literally buy everything from the screen, touches the phone to the screen. It goes to

her mobile cart and then she can, she can pay. That was an amazing transformation for us. Right now,

you know, my store, three makers are like, when am I getting the screen? So, you know, it's been,

it's been really, really remarkable as far as that's that's concerned. And the second example,

I would give you the sort of fuses that all together is that drop ship has traditionally been

an online strategy, but we're taking drop ship to the physical store. And there's a few reasons

why we do that, you know, to ensure that we have a thriving profitable company, you know, we needed

to not just look at revenue and cost and the op-ex, catbacks and all the general things, but we

really need to look at, you know, working capital cash and those kinds of things. And so, you know,

the benefit to our guests are she can walk into a David's and see a huge variety of all these

different kinds of brands, you know. But to us, bringing drop ships slash consignment inside of a

store, it takes less pressure off of our working capital and it allows us to maintain and more,

maintain more profitable business. So, it's, it's looking at everything all around the seams and

booking up, picking up the covers and taking a second and third look at it just to make sure

there's not a way to make it, make it better. Yeah, yeah. And remind me how big your store fleet is now?

So, we have 194 stores in Canada, Mexico and the US, including our first store and store inside

the Liverpool in Mexico. Oh, wow, that's exciting. It's always fun. You can have that international

added to the company's name, right? You're an international company. Yeah. We are. Yeah, it's great.

I wanted to, when you talk about the screen, so you've just deployed that in a percentage of the

fleet so far and then you'd like to expand that moving forward. We do, we did it as a test in

architecture stores. It was wildly successful. Not only that, you know, not only from the the

conversion side, but we measure NPS and the NPS scores higher and those stores than it is in

mainline and our average NPS is average around 80. So, it's, it's pretty darn good. But I believe

the diamonds in Pearl store is in the 82 range. So, the customers and guests love it. Not, not

just that, but our dreammakers that work there love it as well. And then when you talk about the

drop shipping, how does that sort of work on a on a day-to-day basis? Yeah. So, so the, it starts

with what do we need to do in a, and are you, oh, well, let me ask you, are you referring to

online or in store? What the in store drop shipping? Yeah. They store it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it

really starts with what do we need to serve her? We use a variety of tools to do that. We look at

AI data. We look at trend data. We look at forecasting data. But more importantly, we get really good

information directly from our stylist in the field to corporate and we get that every week very fast.

In addition to that, we look at all the people that are searching on our website for our products

and they didn't convert. So, that means they've already made the decision to come to David's.

They go to davisbrottle.com and they put products in the search bar, but they don't buy. That's a

really good indication of something we're doing to not serve her properly. And when we use all that

data, we said, I'll give you an example right now. We found out yesterday in our meeting from

the field and using our data that there is a big trend for Halloween weddings this year.

Well, with Halloween weddings are coming with black wedding dresses, red wedding dresses,

and purple wedding dresses, right? I love to see it. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's great. It's so great.

You should see a video about the not-meber for Christmas wedding. It was so cute. But anyway,

so we're using that now. So now we're working with our partners. Do we have what we need? Is

there a partner that sells that? Help ask when we get it in the stores? And so that's how fast

everything moves. So we have a very flexible, very dynamic. Very cool. Yeah, and this is sort of

you're moving at the speed of social media because you're moving with the trends, right? And this

is something that I recently reported actually on your really awesome prom strategies this year,

really going social first and showing that assortment and making sure that what you're offering in

store is sort of, you know, kind of more wide and shallow versus narrow and deep to make sure

that everyone can have that personalized unique dress. I'm curious if there's anything else that

you feel like has changed for you all on the social media front because I feel like I've seen a lot

with the launch of your affiliate program and some other changes. But, you know, especially some

with a marketing background, I'm just curious what role you feel like social media has played in

this transformation. Yeah, it really is everything. I would say it's really played three key roles.

One is it's gotten the message out to our core brides and promgoers that we have what they're

looking for. And there's no better way to do that through social. Now we haven't gone as far as

done AI influencers, which I know some companies are doing. That feels, I don't know. I'd love to know

what your listeners think. Tell them to email me. Tell their thoughts. But we're still, you know,

real humans, real women, real girls, real lady. So getting the message out was number one.

Two, turning over the content machine to them is fantastic. Like seeing the content that they

develop for our dresses, the way they style it, where they go with it, the fact that they can take

a dress, you know, from desk to date night, the creativity is so inspiring. And they say,

if you look at the people, your circle around you and you're not inspired, then you have a cage,

not a circle, right? And we use inspiration from every place, including our style squad, our

brand ambassadors, our employees. It's really fun. And the third one is selling, you know, it's a

selling opportunity, conversable through social media influencers. And it's, it's extraordinary

to watch them in action. It's, it's absolutely fabulous.

I'm Christina Coe, Senior Editor at Custom Intelligence,

Digital Day Media's and Modern Retails in House Agency. In this podcast,

interstitial story, sponsored by Swap, we speak with Juan Pelerano Rendon, Swap's Chief Marketing

Officer, about the rise of agentate commerce, its education phase, and what retailers should

keep in mind. I certainly think that there are misconceptions and misunderstandings at this point.

And this is a new way for commerce to transact agent to agent or with customers using agents.

And that's fundamentally different from just a chatbot making recommendations, right? Or

the ability to virtually try on. This is a fully new and innovative way to transact. And I think

we're in a bit of a chicken or egg situation where we don't know if it will be the brands that

drive the transition by forcing consumers to adopt, bringing the innovation to the consumers,

or if the consumers will start to demand these types of tools and make it so that the brands

have to adopt them because they just want to transact in this way and use agents. So it will

fundamentally shift in my view this year, where consumers are already using LLMs all the time in

terms of how they work, questions that they ask personally and professionally. So it's only

right that the next thing that will come is in terms of commerce. So will consumers be the ones

that want that experience from the retailers, or will the retailers bring the innovation to those

consumers? We're working on the latter, but hope that consumers will also help drive that innovation

and change by having that expectation from the brands and retailers to bring these experiences to

life. While agent to commerce spent a hot topic, consumers need to understand how the technology

benefits them before they can be active proponents. Until now, agent to commerce, I think it's been

a lot of noise and consumers are probably tired of hearing that there's going to be this big change

and it's going to make it's shopping and consuming a lot easier. But now, once they start to see the

utility of agent to commerce, they're using LLMs and their daily lives. Once it comes to commerce and

how you transact, it's going to be exponential adoption overnight because they realize you can

have guided discovery, guided shopping experience, and really blur the line as close as you can between

physical in-store and digital and e-commerce, where you can have one-to-one experiences with the

agentic sites and ask questions, ask for recommendations, virtually try things on, and then

transact very simply through voice or text in the way that you would in-store. So if you're able to

blur those lines between online and physical retail, certainly consumers are going to adopt it and

want to have that experience more and more. As consumers realize the benefits of agentic commerce,

retailers will need to figure out how they can deliver solutions that make sense for them

while offering consumers what they're looking for. I think retailers are starting to educate

themselves and honestly looking for answers in terms of what's the best way to enable agentic

commerce. That's what we're working on right now and have a lot of brands beta-testing with us

to enable true end-to-end agentic commerce. So as these things become more widely available,

then brands and retailers, I think, will start to act a lot quicker,

tariff with blash, supply chain issues. That's been kind of where everyone's minds have been. I think

as the conversation has shifted in Q1 to be more focused on agentic commerce, more broadly,

you're seeing a lot of retailers roll out their own agentic commerce solutions that are built in

house. So as these things get brought to light more and more, there will be more options for retailers

in which they're able to better decide what makes most sense for them, but until retailers feel

like they're educated enough on what's out there, I don't think there's going to be a ton of

movement in terms of enablement. Being in the education phase of the industry at large and

as consumers adopt it and as brands adopt it and solutions come to market, I think it'll be something

that really fundamentally shifts as we go into Q2 and Q3 of this year.

You've been listening to Juan Pilarano Rendon, Chief Marketing Officer at Swap, our sponsor

on this episode, and now back to the Modern Retail Podcast.

We've talked a little bit about AI, right? And it's something that I am

imagine you're talking about every day with your teams in one way or another. You know,

how do you feel like you've been able to use AI to your advantage to become more relevant,

especially in this world of wedding planning where places like Chat GPT and Google's AI

Powered Search are becoming critical for wedding planning. I think I saw a step from the not

that was about 36% of engaged couples are using AEO or GEO for their wedding planning processes,

which is up from like 20% a year prior. So we're just seeing people climb onto this and I'm

wondering if you can share how you're integrating that trend into the business.

Yes, absolutely. So let's talk about AI in general. You know, I will tell you,

regarding the CRM side of our business. We've been using AI for three years now and that's been

that's been very successful. And then we launched AI and subject lines and copy,

relative to paid digital media. We did that last year. That's been an incredible success as well.

But then we started venturing into content, the agentic AI planning solution for weddings and

went down that path. And you know, we launched agentic AI Pearl last summer. And that is a fully

integrated agentic solution with like with agentic agents rather that will plan your wedding for you

in minutes. Regardless of the attributes of your wedding, the theme or your wedding location,

how big or small it is, our solution will do that for you for free. And you can go in and it acts

as almost like an agentic concierge for you. So anything you need, it's smart enough and it's

proprietary LLM model that was built in-house by our very, very good head of AI and product depth.

Just to clarify there, though, that's built on top of Pearl, which is the the planning network,

explain that to folks who might be unfamiliar. Let's let's start with the the problem statement.

The problem statement is that brides get proposed to they're happy, they're crying and they're like

so excited for about 15 minutes and then panic sets in because they have to plan a wedding.

And their number one emotion for 18 months is stress. So the problem statement that we needed to do

is how do we make this easy for her and ride alongside this journey for her with something that is

almost concierge base that she can reach out to anytime day or night. And this system is smart

enough to know what needs to happen and when and what needs to change for her to have an

effective wedding such as budget. Oh my gosh, I was supposed to spend $500 on flowers and now I'm

spending $1,000 on flowers. And what does that do? Well, the system automatically updates and says,

well, here's what you need to do to overcome that. So step one is, you know, the first step of the

journey book your wedding day, you know, then chose your venue and then pick your flowers and it

takes them alongside this journey and it's very rigid and it has these steps. So that was what we

were trying to do was to make the planning system easy for her and build an agentic layer on top of

that that helps her when she needs help. I love it. Yeah. And are you finding that that's bringing

people into the ecosystem or is it folks who are sort of already in the David's ecosystem using it?

Now, so right when we launched it, it was the people that were already here, but we turned that

corner in Q4 and now it's new. And we kind of expected that because 40% of all engagements occur

between Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day. So that's the peak of it. And that's what's happening. So

they're coming into Pearl first. And I believe that you, you know, Pearl from a brand recognition

standpoint is now surpasses Ola. I think my team told me so it's doing well. So that's what we did

on the consumer facing side. Then we started going down the creative path for AI. That's been

fun, exciting and terrifying at the same time. On the terrifying side, I can't remember if I

shared this with you before Melissa, but you know, this was probably, well, it was before I was CEO,

I think this was probably sometime early 25 into 24. We were experimenting with AI creative.

And I was sitting on the couch on a Friday night and I, you know, had a glass of wine.

It had been a long week and I was on my phone, go through TikTok. And I see this beautiful video

about David's bride like it's our voice. It's our videos and it's talking about our dresses.

And I'm like, oh man, this is so beautiful. Good job team. And then the last screen said

David's bridal B-R-I-D-L-E. And I was like, oh my god. We couldn't have just misspelled a word.

It's the name of the company. And so, but to the team's credit, that was their first fully

produced video, social media video, using all of AI. That was great. I know, isn't it?

But that was great. I was proud of them. But when something goes wrong, you got to, yeah,

you got to pull it apart and find out what happened. Well, what happened is they had bypassed the

QA process because it was generated by AI and not manually. And that's how it went into production.

But I was proud of them for, after I lost 10 years of my life, then I was proud of them,

you know, for trying, you know, sweet for the best. But that, but I love it. Like I'd rather

than fall forward on their face, that, you know, trying things, then fall backwards on their

push, but not trying things. Like, so I think that they did the right thing. So that's working.

We now have, you know, AI videos on our PDPs, that's working nicely. But what's really been

great is the transformation to cloud for internal processing and problem solving. It's completely

transformed our PMO, like completely transformed our PMO and clouds for, cloud has reduced

problem solving and IT in certain cases from weeks to minutes. It's, it's incredible, Melissa. It's

great. Yeah. An incredible time safer. You, you, you had something I wanted to touch on to

about, you know, the product pages and an AI. What's sort of the latest there and how you're

making sure that, you know, you're showing up as David's bridal with your dresses with your

products to folks who are using AI for search? Yeah. So that's, that's great. So as I, as I mentioned,

you know, chat GPT is now the number one search or AI's number one search engine. And it's,

it's fascinating to me, Melissa, because, you know, in the time I've been at David's,

the search engines have, number one search engines have changed four times in six and a half years.

That is crazy. And my heart goes out to every CMO out there. It really does begin. I wonder if

I can guess that. Is it Google, TikTok, now chat GPT? What am I missing? There's the way I,

Amazon. You're right. You're right. You're right. The order's right. So when I got here, it was Google.

No, you were, you were almost there. When I got here, number one search engine was Google.

Two years later, the number one search engine was Amazon. A year and a half later, the number one

search engine was TikTok. Now it's AI search. And for, and, you know, for, for, for experts like you

and the people that are listening, they can feel this and their bones, I'm sure, because

you have to reset and optimize while you're coming off of the last search engine optimization.

And not to mention, you know, PMax and all the other things at Google ad. Like it's, it's,

it's a battlefield out there for marketers for sure. And so one of the things that we did right

away when we saw the pivot was, okay, while we're optimizing digital media spin, what can we do to get

benefit from chat GBT? And I'm proud to say as of today, we've launched PDPs inside chat GBT now.

So if you search purple wedding dress, you know, our products are going to come up. So, so,

so proud of the team. And that kind of goes back, most of what I was saying about talent.

You know, they, they, they figured out a way to, to tear down barriers and obstacles,

you know, to just get things done. And I, I've definitely learned a lot of lessons the first year,

certainly made my share of mistakes. I make mistakes every day. One thing that I think we did do

well is that we instituted two new things when I became CEO. We instituted a center of excellence

for analytics and insights. And we implemented the new AI PMO. And those two things together

have really allowed us to implement change quickly. Yeah. Well, and it sounds like that's fostering

in an environment where folks are sort of encouraged to experiment, try new things, stay with it,

like with the PDP within, you know, AI search, because I mean, this stuff is still relatively new in

the, in the zoomed out, you know, vision, right? And so we don't necessarily know where these services

are going, what they're going to cost users in the future, et cetera, et cetera. So it sounds

like you were willing to let folks, let's take a risk. Let's do this now based on what we're seeing.

And then if you got to change it, we'll change it. That's absolutely what happened, Melissa. We put,

we took something out of the roadmap and put that in because of that. And that, and I, I would say

the ability to flex and pivot, it's crucial. It's absolutely crucial for this kind of large-scale

transformation. Yeah, you know, that when you were talking about this not being for the faint

of heart, that's what that reminds me of because you, if you're so married and stuck to the plan

and stuck to the, the, the to do list that you have set out in front of you of what we got to do

X, Y, and Z. You might miss the bow on something that could be really powerful.

100% right. 100% right. I want to talk a little bit more about culture because you've said some

really great things about making sure that it's a place for, you know, people to feel supported.

And when a brand goes through something like a bankruptcy, you know, that's hard. That's hard

on folks who maybe are no longer with the company and had to be laid off or left, you know,

for other opportunities. It's also hard on the folks who are staying with maybe a little survivor

skill, maybe a little more on their plate. You know, as a leader in the last year, you know,

what if you felt like have been some of the, the changes you've made that have really, you know,

helped company culture or, you know, are there things that you feel like are still something you

got to work on? There's sort of three things relative to that question. You know, one is just

confidence, two is a dream maker social media platform that we launched and three is celebrating

risk. So the first one is confidence, you know, it's, it's tough when you're, you're going through

this amount of change, you know, and you're changing, we're literally molissa changing everything

about how we go to market. And I tell the team, you know, confidence is going after Moby Dick and a

robot and taking the tartar sauce with you, right? You got to stay focused and stay confident all the

time. We're going to pivot, we're going to make mistakes, but that's okay. Um, the second thing

we did regarding culture is really, you know, we call ourselves dream makers and our HR team

led by Andrea, she's done a phenomenal job. We implemented a internal social media platform

called Dreammakers at work. And it's the way we recognize and reward each other. And before, you

know, where you would send a letter or a note or an email saying, you know, great job on XYZ,

you know, now everybody in the company has issued stars and you can get stars to people through

this platform. And when you get stars, you can buy things like TVs and trips and wine. So you're

actually making it tangible in somebody's life through reward and recognition. And I absolutely

love this program. I mean, we're on it all the time, recognizing, uh, employees for incredible

moments, including risk, you know, it's okay, which takes me to the third thing, which is celebrating

risk. You know, we created this program inside called CLM, which stands for career-limiting move.

And I've been doing this at companies for a long, long time. And you've got to celebrate risk.

You've got to celebrate when people try things and even when they make mistakes. And I share a

story from my days at DSW when a young man who ran email marketing for me came up to me and he

goes, oh, Kelly, I think I'm going to win this year's CLM award. And I'm like, all right,

what'd you do? You know, this is great. And he goes, well, you remember that email that we were

going to send out to our customers, which was $5 off a $50 purchase? I'm like, yeah,

remember we were going to do that. And he goes, yeah, I just sent an email to 12 million people

that says $50 off a $50 purchase. And I was like, oh, boy, that's a good one. That's his name

was Scott. He was so sweet. I was like, oh, wow, that's a good, I think I think you did win that

year for that one. Celebrating the fail. That's celebrating the fails. Yeah. Oh my god, you have to,

but to his defense, they tried to turn around an email because we asked him to in 48 hours,

which normally takes a week. So they, they were trying to do the right thing for the business. So

anyway, you got it, you got to have fun. You got, you got to have fun. It's a must have.

Kelly Cook, thank you so much for your time and insights today. It's been a pleasure.

You're welcome. Melissa, you're so awesome. I always enjoy visiting with you. You are one smart

cookie, and I love love chatting with you. Oh, well, I love it too. Thank you so much for your time

today. You're welcome. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Modern Retail Podcast, a show by Digidae Media.

If you haven't already, please subscribe and head to Apple Podcasts to leave us a review

and a rating. If you want more from Modern Retail, you can find us at ModernRetail.co.

You can find me, Senior Reporter Melissa Daniels, on LinkedIn and Blue Sky,

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