David’s Bridal Is Going After The Wedding Planning Market With New Platform

David’s Bridal, the country’s largest specialty bridal retailer, is moving into the wedding planning and marketplace space with the launch today of its new platform, Pearl.

David’s is going up against The Knot and WeddingWire, the best-known names in the wedding marketplace industry, as well as a host of smaller startups. These companies, in addition to offering wedding announcements and registries for brides, charge wedding vendors for featured listings and connections with prospective brides.

David’s is hoping to leverage its position as the leading bridal and special occasions retail chain to build a wedding planning site that will challenge the top players in the space.

It believes it has a key advantage over the competition: ongoing access to, and engagement with, lots of brides.

“We have the brides,” said David’s Bridal CEO Jim Marcum.

“We think it’s a very logical evolution, linking our customer with the vendor community out there,” Marcum said in an interview.

David’s Bridal, Marcum said, sells 25-30% of all wedding dresses purchased in this country and has significant brand awareness, with over two-thirds of brides surveyed saying they are considering buying from David’s.

The push into wedding services is part of a multi-pronged strategy by David’s to use its stores, and its growing digital strength, to take a bigger share of the wedding and events market.

“Everything that we’ve done,” Marcum said, has been focused on engaging with brides-to-be before they buy the dress.

David’s Bridal also has been positioning itself as the go-to-store for events beyond weddings, such as proms, quinceanera parties, and other celebrations.

David’s network of 280 U.S. stores will help it to connect with local vendors in cities and regions across the country, Marcum said.

David’s Bridal representatives attend 600-650 bridal shows a year as a vendor, giving the company insight into the needs of local photographers, musicians, restaurants, florists, and other wedding providers seeking to connect with brides, grooms, and wedding planners, he said.

“You go to these events,” he said, “and you have all these entrepreneurs that come to the event. Why do they do it? They do it because they want to get leads,” he said.

The Pearl platform will give local entrepreneurs a place where they can have their own web page highlighting their services, and where they can connect with David’s Bridal’s customers, Marcum said.

“We’ve developed some phenomenal tools to help the vendor easily go online and set up their website, which is what is going to give them the exposure for their category of business to the brides,” he said.

Another advantage for vendors, according to David’s Bridal, is the opportunity to potentially reach more brides at a lower cost than other wedding planning sites. Vendors will have the option of choosing a free starter rate; the $49-a-month “essential” rate, or the $118-a-month premium rate.

Compared to competitors, “we will be significantly below their pricing, even on our premium packages,” Marcum said. The higher-priced plans will provide vendors with enhanced analytics, preferred listing placements, and expanded content on the platform.

Spectrum Equity, one of the private equity owners of the merged WeddingWire and The Knot, in a 2019 report on its website said U.S. couples typically work with an average of 13 different vendors to plan a wedding, and that there are some 2 million small businesses involved in selling services for weddings. The report said The Knot and WeddingWire had over $300 million in revenue in 2018.

The Pearl platform has been quietly signing up wedding venues and vendors for several months, and is being announced publicly today.

Brides and vendors will be able to access Pearl through the David’s Bridal website, through Pearl.com, or on the Pearl mobile app.

David’s Bridal began a controlled beta test of the platform last year. The site, even before the national launch, has over 100,000 vendor listings, Marcum said.

David’s Bridal, a private company, declined to disclose how much it has spent on the launch of Pearl.

Marcum became CEO of David’s Bridal in mid-2019, with the job of revitalizing a then-69-year-old bridal chain that was on the rebound from bankruptcy.

David’s filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and was able to emerge from bankruptcy within two months without closing any stores, but with a sizable amount of debt to pay off.

Marcum has made strides in improving David’s image with today’s generation of young brides, through creative use of social media and enhanced technology.

Marcum said David’s Bridal has proceeded cautiously in launching the Pearl platform because he knows there is a lot of competition in the wedding vendor marketplace category.

“We wanted to make sure the experience is right,” he said. “But when you think about it it’s such a natural evolution for us because we have the bride. We’re trying to really make this experience around the wedding planning and the journey seamless. That’s how we’re going to differentiate it,” he said.