Inside David's Bridal's post-bankruptcy turnaround

0:00The 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. Join us for the Modern Retail Marketing Summit taking place April 20th through

1:0222nd and Huntington Beach, California. Brand leaders from Thrive Market, Codary, Paxon and many others will dive into how they're navigating a marketing landscape that's changing quicker than ever. This annual summit will equip you with the knowledge, strategies and connections you need through our one-on-one meetings, working groups, casual networking and more. Don't wait! We're offering $200 off with the promo code Summit 2026, No Spaces. Again, that's Summit 2026, No Spaces. Go to modernretail.co slash marketing summit to learn more and secure your paths. Branson retailers may be eligible for a complimentary pass apply on the event page to see if you qualify. Welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast. It's our show that covers the ways the

2:03retail 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

3:04also 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

4:05filed 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

5:10trajectory 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

6:15anything 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

7:18been 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,

8:18a 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

9:21that 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

10:23shareholders. 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

11:25the 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.

12:27One 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.

13:33So 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

14:37in 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

15:41we 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.

16:41You 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

17:42right 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,

18:47but 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,

19:53you 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

20:54store, 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

21:58conversion 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.

23:01In 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

24:03everything 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

25:07looking 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

26:11brand 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

27:18we'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

28:18and 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

29:22transact 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,

30:27you'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

31:30imagine 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,

32:31relative 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.

33:37The 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

34:42were 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

35:46shared 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

36:47produced 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

37:53problem 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,

38:55Amazon. 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.

39:59So 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

41:01the, 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

42:04really 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

43:07about 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

44:08moments, 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

45:09was 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

46:12and 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, and you can also subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter at the Modern Retail Profile. We'll see you next week.