Some Bridal Shops Asked Brides to Sign a Weight Waiver. David's Guaranteed the Fit, and the Sale Came Back Three Weeks Earlier.
· CX Pulse
David's Bridal guaranteed the fit on any dress in May. Within a week, brides were buying three weeks earlier. Here is what that says about customers who wait.
Some Bridal Shops Asked Brides to Sign a Weight Waiver. David's Guaranteed the Fit, and the Sale Came Back Three Weeks Earlier.
David's Bridal started guaranteeing the fit of every dress in May. This week its CEO, Kelly Cook, told Retail Dive what happened next. Within seven days, the gap between a bride buying her dress and her wedding day "went back two weeks, then it went back three weeks," to where it sat before weight-loss drugs changed how brides shop. The company hadn't cut a price or hired a faster tailor. It had changed who carries the risk of a dress not fitting.
What the data showed
By David's own May release, rush orders were up 50% in a year and one in five bridal customers had moved to buying six months out or less, instead of nine to twelve. Cook told Retail Dive the average dress size had dropped from a 12 or 14 to a 6, 8 or 10. Brides on GLP-1s were waiting as long as they could before committing to a size, then paying rush fees when the date arrived anyway. Gallup put 11% of U.S. adults on a GLP-1 for weight loss in September, up from 3% two years earlier.
Some wedding retailers answered that by making brides sign waivers about their weight loss, Cook said. David's answered on May 12 with a guarantee: any dress, bought from David's or anywhere else, held until the customer is ready, then altered or swapped for a different size when she is, "no waivers, no contracts, no asterisks." Cook's design question was one sentence: what is "the one thing that we can do to serve her relative to this issue that takes the issue completely off the table."
The customer who waits has usually already chosen
A bride who comes in, finds the dress and leaves without it has chosen the dress. What she can't choose yet is her own size in nine months, and no product page answers that. Every month she waits, the retailer carries the inventory, loses the early sale, then sells the same dress on a rush timeline at a worse margin. The waiver tries to solve the retailer's half of that problem by writing the uncertainty onto the customer. The guarantee solves the customer's half, and the purchase date moved within a week.
Destination XL, the men's big-and-tall retailer, is living the other version. It estimates a quarter of its customers are on a GLP-1, and its then-CEO told analysts this spring they are "trying not to buy clothes until they're done with that journey." Its new chief growth officer said in September that most of them "intend to come back" once their size is stable. An intention to return isn't a sale, and the trigger, a stable body, is one the retailer doesn't control.
If you run CX at scale
The deferred purchase doesn't show up in your returns report. It shows up as a longer time from first visit to purchase, more rush and expedite fees, and inventory held for a customer who may never come back for it. Pull the distribution of days between first contact and purchase for the last two years. If the tail has grown, find out what the customer is waiting to know, and whether a policy could answer it for them.
Then cost the guarantee against what you are already paying. Coresight puts online apparel returns above 23%, roughly $47 billion a year, with sizing and fit the top reason. ReturnPro found 65% of GLP-1 users now bracket, buying several sizes to return the rest, and 83% of those keep the extra sizes in case they keep losing weight. An alteration you promised is cheaper than a return you didn't plan for. Write the terms so nobody at the counter has to decide: which purchases qualify, how long the hold lasts, who can authorize a size swap, and what happens when the customer bought somewhere else. David's chose to cover dresses bought elsewhere. That's a decision, and yours should be written down too.
If you run a smaller business
You hear a version of this every week: the booking that's waiting on a budget approval, the order that's waiting on measurements, the job that's waiting until after the move. The customer has decided on you. What they can't decide is something about their own future, and they're waiting for it to settle on its own. Ask the ten most recent people who said they'd come back what they were waiting on. If most of them name the same thing, write a guarantee for that one thing: hold the price for 60 days, re-measure for free, swap the size once at no charge. The cost is a handful of exceptions. The return is the sale now, instead of maybe.
Brides didn't ask David's for a faster tailor or a cheaper dress. The dress was chosen. The open question was who would carry the risk of her being a different size by the wedding, and some shops answered it with a signature on a waiver. A waiver makes the customer carry the risk. A guarantee moves the sale to whoever carries it, and at David's that move took seven days.
Source: David's Bridal's May 12 release (Newswire), with Kelly Cook's Oct. 5 interview in Retail Dive (Kaarin Moore), which also carries the Coresight, ReturnPro, Gallup and Destination XL figures.