[00:00:00] Phillip: Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip.

[00:00:04] Alicia: And I'm Alicia.

[00:00:05] Phillip: And today we are back at Shoptalk. It's day three, and we're surviving— actually, we're thriving. And our newest book, Strata, is out. If you haven't picked up a copy just yet, get it on pre-order— it comes out on April 14. It is at futurecommerce.com/strata. It's about the 10 aesthetics that are most important this year, and that will guide how commerce and culture are shaping the world around us. And, speaking of aesthetics that shape the world around us— you know, last year we had Kelly from David's Bridal on the show. I think today we get to sit down with the Chief Communications and Creative Officer of David's Bridal, Lisa Horton. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:40] Lisa Horton: Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be with you guys.

[00:00:42] Phillip: I just saw you on the main stage right behind us, and heard a little bit about the story— so I know what we're gonna talk about here today. But, for those who don't know who you are, tell us a little bit about what you're doing over there at David's Bridal, because you guys are innovating.

[00:00:53] Lisa Horton: We are. You know, we like to say we're basically a startup inside of a 76-year-old retailer, and it's a really exciting time for us. Almost a year ago, on April 1 of 2025, we announced Kelly as our CEO, but we also announced our "Aisle to Algorithm" strategic pivot. And at the cornerstone of that has really been AI— technology and innovation— through everything from platforms and offerings and merchandising, to the way that we're even communicating internally, to— from my side of things, on the marketing and creative side— we're implementing a lot of new technologies. So it's been really exciting. We've announced a ton in the last twelve months, and I'm excited to chat with you guys about it.

[00:01:37] Phillip: Oh, it's so good. And you have a background, I believe, on the agency side. I do too, so I feel like we could probably jam on that a little bit. I think we'll maybe touch on that a little bit today, because I think the way that our background, our past, informs, sort of, our decision-making, our approaches to problem-solving matters. So I definitely wanna touch on that today. And I know that Style Squad is something that I wanna focus on here today too, because the creator topic has come up so much. And— I don't wanna be the one to draw a lot of contrast around here, but if you look at the size of the AI stage— and I'll do this when we do the wrap-up show— the AI stage is, like, one-fourth the size of the media and marketing stage over here this year, even though I think the discourse is disproportionately skewed towards AI. Style Squad is very, you know, micro-influencer and creator-focused. Tell us what you're doing on that side.

[00:02:35] Lisa Horton: Yeah. So, in January, we announced the Style Squad, which is our ambassador program. So we are connecting with everyday influencers. We have macro influencers as a part of the program, but we also have nano influencers as part of the program. We have people that are just building a following, or maybe they're just influencers in their own communities, right— with their own friends and family. But what I think is really interesting about the Style Squad is, it was important for us that when we launched this, that we didn't separate the ability to have creators and our employees as a part of the program. So all of our employees at David's Bridal are called Dream Makers. And so when we launched the Style Squad, we initially— and immediately— opened it up to everyone, including our Dream Makers. And what we saw is— you know, there are several retailers out there who I think are doing a fantastic job with their own version of different ambassador programs, but they're either really focused on their employees, or they're really focused on creators. No one was really bridging that gap. And for us, our Dream Makers have always been on the front lines.

[00:03:45] Lisa Horton: I mean, these are our first line with our customers, and they are a part of some of the biggest moments of our customers' lives— helping them pick a wedding dress. And they were already creating content for us. They were excited to do it. A lot of our stores actually have their own Instagram accounts and their own TikTok accounts, and are natively posting to their local and regional communities. And so we wanted to figure out a way to sort of codify that passion and excitement, and also reward them for doing that. And we didn't want it to just be rewarding in, "Here are some bonus points that you can go shop on the company store with," but actual, real, cold hard cash that you can earn— commission for. So we are currently offering the most aggressive commission in retail for affiliate and ambassador— 20%— and that's for our Dream Makers and for creators. And when you think about it— if you sell a $5,000 gown, we're giving you 20% on that. So it's really exciting.

[00:04:48] Phillip: I mean— I don't buy a lot of wedding dresses, so I'm shocked to hear that. I might have only got one—

[00:04:54] Alicia: And it was actually at David's Bridal, I will say that.

[00:04:57] Lisa Horton: I love that.

[00:04:59] Alicia: It makes me so happy.

[00:05:02] Phillip: I see the photos, by the way—

[00:05:03] Alicia: You were stunning. Thank you. Going on ten years, actually.

[00:05:?] Phillip: Congratulations.

[00:05:?] Alicia: So— I think what's interesting, the point that you brought up, is a lot of your Dream Makers were creating this content anyways. And it's not just a business experience for them, but it's also an emotional experience too, because they're literally going on this journey with every person that comes through that door. So— going back to the point that you were on the agency side— were you able to tap into some of those, like, emotional and psychological elements to shape this program? Because you were coming from, like, the outside, in a lot of ways. So you probably were able to look at the brand through a completely different lens than some folks on the inside.

[00:05:46] Lisa Horton: Yeah. I think so. And I think that that's what drew me to David's, and what drew David's to me too. I think coming from an agency is one of my superpowers. You know that experience— when you come from an agency, you're cut from a different cloth. You have to be really scrappy and really entrepreneurial. You know, I cut my teeth originally in tech PR, working back in the day with brands like Fujitsu, and talking about cloud computing and biometrics and data analytics— and, yep, talking about AI back then, when it was like "iRobot" AI— scary, super scary— not what we know it to be now. But then I made my way into consumer and lifestyle, and because I got to work with so many incredible brands— startups to unicorns to publicly traded companies— I feel like I took a little piece of that in everything, and have now been able to kind of create this little puzzle that I'm bringing over to David's, to see how we can really thread the needle. You know, there's a lot that falls under my purview, in terms of organic marketing, social, creative, visual merchandising in the stores, and now content. We just launched our first original series on YouTube, which is super exciting. And so it's really important that everything isn't siloed, and really is holistic. And I think the Style Squad is a big part of that.

[00:07:10] Lisa Horton: One of the other pieces that I sort of took from the agency side of things is the need to really give influencer and creator marketing a seat at the table. It shouldn't be an afterthought, or have its own separate strategy. It needs to really speak to your overall holistic strategy. And that's what I talked about on stage— which, I think Style Squad is sort of the personification of that— because what we saw from our own data was, we were producing all of this amazing editorial content every season. We would shoot different campaigns, and they were stunning. They deserved to be on the cover of Vogue. But what we saw is that they weren't performing at the same level as the social-first creative that we were doing with influencers, or UGC, or what just our social team was creating in-house. And so we made a really conscious decision this year to flip some of our marketing budget, and actually reduce the amount that we're putting into traditional content and photography, and increase the amount that we're putting into social— and, you know, social-first content. And the Style Squad is a part of that— because, yes, we are offering amazing affiliate and commission opportunities, but really, at the end of the day, what it comes down to is driving UGC and social content at scale, which is really exciting for us.

[00:08:34] Phillip: All of that, I think, also ends in the brand loyalty— because people want to have that great experience, and they want to have that experience with the brand. And then you want that brand experience to end in generational loyalty. Because all of that work that you're doing, and all of that generosity that you're spending upfront from a business sense— it's CAC, right? This is customer acquisition. You want that customer acquisition to pay it forward. And if you had an amazing experience shopping at David's Bridal, you would assume that your daughters, or your generations beyond you, would want to shop there as well.

[00:09:15] Lisa Horton: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is what we're seeing, and what we're wanting to invest in more from our influencer and social content— because, you know, it's similar to PR in a lot of ways, right? You can tell the world how great you are, but when they hear it from someone else, that's when they really start to listen and receive it.

[00:09:34] Alicia: Yep.

[00:09:34] Lisa Horton: And so that's what we're really able to get. And I think our approach to influencer marketing is similar to how we're doing this ambassador program. We want people to have a real connection to the brand. We're sending them product. We're offering for them to go into the stores and shoot their content, and giving them a place to create that content naturally and organically. We want them to feel like they have skin in the game, and that they are excited to tell their story and how David's Bridal fits into that. I mean, how many other retailers can say, "We can dress you from being a flower girl to the grandmother of the bride"? Like, it's— I get chills talking about it. It's really emotional, and it's exciting, and it's why we love what we do, and why we're so passionate about it.

[00:10:15] Phillip: I mean— as an aside, we have a product at Future Commerce Plus called the Word-of-Mouth Index. I was going to mention it—

[00:10:20] Alicia: I was gonna bring that up. Yeah.

[00:10:22] Phillip: You know, it's our own internal data in partnership with our partners at Fairing. And Fairing has this incredible place in the industry where they conduct post-purchase surveys for some of the top 5,000 largest brands on Shopify. And they find out, consistently, over and over again, that the largest predictor of every positive metric that you could want in a customer relationship— whether that's conversion to subscription, or likelihood to repurchase, or that conversion to a second order or third order, or a higher basket size— every metric that you want as a positive signal of trust with the consumer is correlated with word-of-mouth.

[00:11:06] Lisa Horton: Yeah.

[00:11:06] Phillip: And there are second- and third-order signals as well. The word-of-mouth is an index that we should be tracking more closely in our relationships with our customers, and I don't know that we do that enough. So I'll actually ask you how you're doing that at the organization— but, just a shameless plug, that is part of our paid membership, futurecommerce.com/plus. And we track that on a month-to-month basis. We write about it a lot, Alicia.

[00:11:33] Lisa Horton: I love that. That's great.

[00:11:36] Alicia: Well— and I think what's interesting too— Phillip talked about the familial aspect of generation to generation, but I think even amongst friends, or, you know, the creator specifically— since we're looking at, like, the nano influencer level— all it takes is for someone to feel like, "This person is like me. They're going through a similar experience as me. They maybe have a similar aesthetic for what I'm going for." So, like, that trust activation— that's word-of-mouth through, like, a completely different lens as well. Because when you're planning a wedding— it's not just, like, shopping for wedding dresses, right? It's the whole planning experience that you're looking at.

[00:12:08] Lisa Horton: Yeah. I mean, we have shifted in the last twelve months from being a legacy retailer to a 360-degree wedding planning ecosystem. We now have Pearl Planner, which is the first proprietary AI wedding planning platform, and we now have Travel by David's. And we're RFP-ing your room blocks for you for your wedding, and we're booking cruises and honeymoons and all of these different things.

[00:12:32] Phillip: And we—

[00:12:32] Lisa Horton: We have a retail media network side, and we're doing things on the B2B side of things, which is exciting. But something that you both talked about— that I spoke about on stage yesterday— which is, I think the definition of "influencer" is really fundamentally shifting. And what I mean by that is, more so, the definition is broadening in scope. Because, in my opinion, word-of-mouth is influence, right? Everyone is influential. And the days of these inaccessible, sort of, influencers— and we talked about what do you consider to be the difference between a creator and an influencer, and all these different things— for me, you're an influencer. I'm sure your best friend, your mom, your sister, your brother—

[00:13:15] Alicia: Oh, I told everyone. Right.

[00:13:17] Lisa Horton: They care about what you want, right? And then you're influencing friends and family, and they're influencing others, and so on and so forth. So that's one of the things I think is really powerful around the future of social media and marketing in general, but then also these ambassador programs. I think we're gonna see more ambassador programs— and it's also part of what we're seeing from our own loyalty program as well. You know, we have the— we're the only wedding loyalty program right now, called— Platinum, or Diamond Loyalty, excuse me. And what we are seeing is that loyalty connection, the ambassador connection, the influence connection— it creates this really beautiful, cyclical experience.

[00:13:56] Alicia: Yeah. So you brought up original programming. You brought up retail media. So what is the approach for embedding these first-person accounts, these customer stories, these influencer stories? Because it's about striking that balance between, like, curated aesthetic and inspiration that feels more editorial, versus, like, that authentic and human side. So how do you go about that?

[00:14:18] Lisa Horton: Yeah. For us, we want to be your destination for inspiration, shopping, and planning. So— you know, brides start planning their wedding twelve to eighteen months before they even get engaged. So for us, if we're capturing her at the point of engagement, we feel like we're behind the eight ball. And so by broadening our content offering— specifically, you know, the entertainment side of things— we're hopefully leveraging that to pull her into our ecosystem, pull her into our funnel a little bit early. And that's why we chose that the original programming that we launched is a docu-style series. So it's following real couples, real wedding stories. It's called Breaking Bridal— and we called it that because it's all about celebrating breaking the bridal mold, honoring traditions, but doing it in a way that feels authentic to you and your partner and your own love story. And we feel like that's synonymous with where David's is right now. We feel like we're sort of breaking the mold when it comes to bridal retailers, and just retailers in general, and sort of changing the perception of what people have known us to be for the last seventy-five years. And it's really exciting, and we want every person that interacts with the brand to end up going, "That was David's? Okay. We see it. We get it." So we're excited.

[00:15:40] Phillip: That's so great. And, to Alicia's point before— we understand how the internals of our ecosystem are changing, and so you're sort of rising to integrate a lot of those changes here. I think retail media was part of that. But just to, like, wrap up how holistic your strategy really is— there's integrated, you know— you are the only player in the wedding industry with integrated retail, loyalty, and media planning. Like, that's everything we've covered. That's a lot of first-party data that I think a lot of others just do not have, right?

[00:16:17] Lisa Horton: Yeah. I mean, so we have 90% of brides that enter our ecosystem. 90%. And so we are excited about continuing to expand our offering and our services— whether that's through our asset-light retail model, and expanding the categories and price points and designers that we're working with through drop-ship and our marketplace and vendor program, or through more technology offerings on the AI side of it. And we want to make sure that we are serving brides— all brides— no matter what. We also just recently announced that we were moving into wholesale, for that very reason. You know, at the end of the day, we wanna produce the dress that she's going to wear when she walks down the aisle. We're okay if it doesn't mean that maybe she's not necessarily coming into our store, but going into a boutique— and we wanna help empower that. As long as we're serving every bride, we're really, really happy. And so it's exciting to sort of, again, connect all the dots of what we're doing.

[00:17:18] Phillip: There's— yeah, "Aisle to Algorithm"— you have a— we work with us that—

[00:17:21] Alicia: Aisle to Algorithm.

[00:17:22] Lisa Horton: That's it— Aisle to Algorithm. You've heard it a few times, I'm sure. But, yeah, it's exciting. And that first-party data that you mentioned— we're really excited as a company to kick things up even more this year in 2026, and really find more innovative ways to leverage all of that first-party data. And then, also, we're allowing our clients and customers on the retail media side and the sales and partnership side to be able to leverage our first-party data as well, for their customers.

[00:17:51] Alicia: So fascinating.

[00:17:52] Phillip: We've done a lot of our own research, because— you know, our insights team is always looking at how culture is shifting, how culture is changing. Alicia, we, over the holidays, looked at how generations are even just adapting to AI. I can't imagine how generational tastes and cultural shifts are impacting weddings.

[00:18:17] Lisa Horton: Yeah, absolutely. So I think we're sort of now seeing the entrance of the Gen Z bride and Gen Z groom. And what we're seeing from them is kind of what I was talking about with the impetus of Breaking Bridal— which is celebrating individuality, celebrating authenticity, wanting everything from the shoes that they're wearing and the dress that they're wearing, to the type of decor that they have at their wedding, to the size of the wedding. And so we're continuing to learn and listen, right? We talked about social listening— to see what it is that they want that's different than the last generation. And we take all that market insight and that first-party data, and we use AI internally to be able to move really quickly— whether that's, again, to create a new offering, or even on the merchandising side of things. Our merchandise team is incredibly connected and has their finger on the pulse to be able to move really quickly to say, "Okay, what is the trend that we need to get in front of her, and how do we make sure that we are getting what she needs and meeting her where she is?"

[00:19:21] Alicia: Mhmm. That's great. So you have all of these incredible signals. And then, from your side, you're also seeing all this incredible content that's being created and shared, both from the consumer side as well as the Dream Maker side. Have there been any trends or, like, major, like, rule-breaking moments that have sparked inspiration for you personally, on the creative and communication side, where you're like, "Wow, this is, like, where we're heading as an industry"?

[00:19:46] Lisa Horton: I think for me— going back to— and I'm dating myself as an older millennial— but, you know, back in the days of when YouTube really became big, we were sitting there— at least I was— watching makeup tutorial after makeup tutorial, feeling like you were in the room with that person, and you were, like, their best friend. And then I think we sort of saw this evolution of that more aspirational sort of content and influencer. And now I think we're back to wanting that realness in general, right? So that content that is the "get ready with me," the feeling like you're in the room with them, the "I'm letting you in on a secret," the "no gatekeeping" type of content— which has been really exciting, because that also is, like, the ethos of our brand in general. We want her to know that we get her, and we see her, and we hear her. And so I think that's a signal that we've seen a lot— in the type of content that is not only being produced from our ambassadors, but is really performing the best.

[00:20:53] Phillip: We've covered so much ground here. I mean, it sounds like you're the brand of the future already. I usually ask, "What's next?"—

[00:21:01] Alicia: You said it.

[00:21:01] Phillip: I mean, it's hard to even ask you what could possibly be next. It sounds like you're executing the full strategy playbook— but what does 2026 hold? What are you looking forward to in the future?

[00:21:14] Lisa Horton: Yeah. I mean, I think we are continuously evolving that ecosystem, and we really see a future beyond just the wedding. Really, you know— after we say "I do," the majority of women become what we consider to be the household CEO, and they're responsible for making 85% of the purchase decisions inside the household. And so I think there is a lot of excitement for us to be able to take all of the great tech that we have, and data and insights and knowledge, and propel that outside and beyond the wedding space. So there are a lot of exciting things coming up there. And we want to really create— in a non-cheesy way— that, sort of, one-stop shop. Because, you know, after you get engaged, the first feeling you feel is excitement. The second emotion you feel is—

[00:22:07] Alicia: Overwhelmed. Overwhelming.

[00:22:08] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:22:09] Lisa Horton: Stress, right? And so everything that we do moving forward is always going to come from a place of, "How do we mitigate her stress? How do we make her feel excited and seen and celebratory in every moment and milestone of her journey?" And so we're excited about how that's gonna continue to go. And you're gonna see more technology, more AI innovation coming from us. So there are some other things on the horizon there. You know, we don't take it lightly that we— we are a tech-enabled, AI-powered wedding marketplace, planning platform, and shopping destination. That is in the ethos and the DNA of everything that we are at David's. We don't wanna just be a retailer. We wanna be a tech company, and we're really excited about that.

[00:22:58] Phillip: Wow. A great place to leave it. I hope you had a great show.

[00:23:03] Lisa Horton: Thank you. This was exciting. This was actually my first Shoptalk, so I am excited— you know, as we mentioned, coming from the agency side, and now being here with David's. It's really exciting. I got to meet some great people, and this is a great way to close it out. Thank you both.

[00:23:16] Phillip: Oh, of course. Awesome. And if you're listening, subscribe everywhere that Future Commerce is found, and get our newest book. It's called Strata, The 10 Aesthetics of Commerce. You can get it at futurecommerce.com/strata. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.