David’s Bridal enters omnichannel floral partnership
The nation's largest bridal retailer is teaming up with a sustainably sourced fresh floral brand.
David’s Bridal is creating an omnichannel shopping experience in collaboration with The Bouqs Company Weddings. The floral brand’s business model focuses on partnering with sustainable farms that focus on minimizing waste, recycling water, and cutting out the middleman for direct-to-consumer flowers.
As part of this new partnership, The Bouqs Company Weddings will have a physical and digital presence, as well as exclusive offers for Diamond Loyalty members, with plans to continually build out its exposure to David’s Bridal customers. David’s Bridal will also integrate The Bouqs Company Weddings into its latest launches and imagery.
This collaboration is the latest in a long series of omnichannel efforts David’s Bridal has been launching. Other attempts the retailer has made at digitalization in the past 18 months include releasing an artificial intelligence (AI)-based mobile concierge bot, providing augmented reality (AR) and 3D visualizations of dresses, an omnichannel wedding lookbook, and a livestreaming partnership with YouTube.
In addition, flower retailing is generally becoming a more popular digital commerce niche. In time for the June 2021 wedding season, Albertsons Cos. began offering what it calls an environmentally-friendly online option for purchasing fresh, hand-cut wedding flowers. Albertsons’ online flower portal allows customers to choose between several flower types and colors from various themed collections.
Tech-focused e-tailer Newegg also recently launched a new online floral storefront. The company is offering a large assortment of fresh flowers for under $50 and a number of products offering free delivery. Newegg says it will apply its efficiency of scale and ability to leverage preferred shipping rates to provide floral customers maximum value.
Newegg began testing online flower delivery earlier in 2021, which enabled it to validate market demand and fine-tune how it promotes floral products to customers. The company is partnering directly with farms in the U.S. and South America, which it says allows it to source the freshest flowers and plants to ship directly to customers overnight, while keeping costs down for shoppers.
"Our partnership with The Bouqs Company Weddings is something very special, said Maggie Lord, VP of partnerships for David's Bridal. "Florals are an incredibly important component to the wedding day - they help tell a story and bring joy to the big day. Their belief of delivering sustainably sourced, fresh products as well as their thirst for innovation runs parallel with our foundational values in service. Not to mention their elevated digital customer experience fits our omnichannel strategy perfectly."
"We are excited to be partnering with David's Bridal, the leading bridal retailer, and we look forward to offering their customers our Arranged or DIY packages to bring their wedding day floral vision to life" said Karimah Knowles, GM of weddings at The Bouqs Co. "This partnership is key to bringing our wedding floral designs to a wider audience."
David's Bridal operates more than 300 stores located across the US, Canada, and U.K., and franchise locations in Mexico.