David’s Bridal adds budgeting to AI wedding planning tool
A leading bridal and special occasion retailer is introducing smart budgeting features within its artificial intelligence-based Pearl Planner solution.
Introduced by David's Bridal in June 2025, Pearl Planner is designed to serve as a 24/7 AI wedding planning assistant that can walk a couple through the entire process, including budgeting, registry, and vendor research. Based on agentic AI, Pearl Planner is designed to offers a hyper-personalized experience that continuously learns from new trends, planning behaviors, and evolving preferences.
[READ MORE: David's Bridal launches agentic AI wedding planning tool]
Pearl Planner now offers a free proprietary agentic AI budgeting feature that enables customers to perform the following budgetary tasks:
●Smart budget setup & validation: Pearl Planner replaces spreadsheets by allowing users to enter their total budget, location, and guest count to then see a real-time chart of average costs for their specific region.
●Personalized category planning: Users select from 12 expense categories, such as venue, catering, photography, and then rate their importance. Pearl AI then automatically distributes funds based on these priorities and local market data.
●Performance dashboard & real-time rebalancing: Customers can tell Pearl Planner in natural language about a large expense in one area of the wedding and the budgeting tool then automatically calculates and suggests specific adjustments across other categories, such as entertainment or decor, to accommodate the desired item while keeping the total budget on track.
●Agentic expense tracking: Users can upload a receipt, or describe an expense using natural language, and the budgeting tool will automatically pull and categorize the expense details.
●AI insights: By analyzing total budget, guest count, and specific priorities, the AI solution highlights exactly where customers are saving and where they need to adjust.
“Planning a wedding is one of life’s most beautiful journeys, but the financial complexity can often overshadow the joy,” said Elina Vilk, president and chief business officer of David’s Bridal. “By pairing several decades of heart-led wedding expertise with the precision of our proprietary AI, we’ve created more than just a calculator – we’ve built a partner. Pearl Planner gives couples certainty, so they can stop worrying about the math and focus on moments that truly matter.”
'Aisle to Algorithm' - a brief primer
Pearl Planner is available for free to all customers and is part of a broader transformation to an asset-light, AI-powered business model known as "Aisle to Algorithm."Revolving around a three-pronged strategy, David’s Aisles to Algorithm is focused on addressing evolving needs around:
Inspiration – Retail media network
According to David’s Bridal, its Pearl Media Network provides the only first-party data in the bridal market and is designed to enable hyper-targeted marketing campaigns across digital, social, video-on-demand, linear, and in-store touchpoints.
Shopping – New product categories
David’s Bridal says it sells nearly one-third of wedding dresses in the U.S. and plans to expand into new categories throughout 2025, including menswear, accessories, swimwear, luxury and couture. The company also intends to enhance in-store and digital customers experiences.
Planning: AI-powered tools
David’s Bridal has been utilizing AI, which drives 90% of its customer communications, since 2022 to customize shopping and product discovery. The company introduced an artificial intelligence-equipped full-stack wedding planning platform known as “Pearl Planner” in June 2025.
During the next five years, the retailer aims to expand past the more than $4.1 billion wedding dress market and become an overall dominant player in the more than $65 billion wedding industry with a 6.8% compound annual growth rate.
Other tech-related moves David’s Bridal has made include going live on the Shopify Agentic Storefronts digital commerce platform across the ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot generative AI engines, introducing a new resale program called “Adored by David’s,” extending its Diamond Loyalty program to all members of the wedding party, combining its offerings with the more than 40,000 customizable items and exclusive designs from 1-800-Flowers.com subsidiary PersonalizationMall.com, and partnering with DoorDash for on-demand delivery.
David’s Bridal operates more than 180 stores across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
