David’s Bridal enables digital fraud detection with help from AI
A leading bridal and special occasion dress retailer is beefing up its online anti-fraud efforts.
David's Bridal is deploying the Forter artificial intelligence-based e-commerce decisioning platform to boost its ability to detect fraudulent online transactions without incorrectly flagging legitimate purchases. According to the retailer, bridal purchasing behavior — including customers who are one-time or infrequent purchasers, multiple shipping addresses tied to a single billing address and freight forwarders — can look like fraud to systems trained on conventional retail signals.
The retailer selected Forter technology for its ability to distinguish fraud from legitimate bridal edge cases. Partnering with Chief Digital Agency (CDA) to implement the solution, David’s achieved a 99.78% approval rate during the first two weeks of launch, improving authorization performance while reducing friction for legitimate customers.
"Every technology investment we make starts with one objective: creating a better experience for our guests while building a more agile business," said Scott Saeger, CTO at David's Bridal. "As we continue transforming our technology ecosystem, we are grateful for partners like Forter and CDA. Our teams worked together to execute this implementation in days, not months –– the immediate improvement in approval rates demonstrates what's possible when modern technology is paired with strong, collaborative execution."
'Aisle to Algorithm' - a brief primer
This deployment is the latest step in David's "Aisle to Algorithm" initiative, which is a broad transformation to an asset-light, AI-powered business model based on the company’s the company’s Pearl digital wedding ecosystem. In June 2025, David’s introduced Pearl Planner, available for free to all customers and 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.
[READ MORE: David's Bridal launches agentic AI wedding planning tool]
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.
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 190 stores across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
