Role: Head of Product & AI | Company: David’s Bridal | Type: AI-native product, 0-to-1 build
Picking your wedding colors sounds simple. Actually doing it isn’t. You’ve got a shade or two you love, a Pinterest board full of half-formed ideas, and no real way to see how it all comes together — the flowers, the table, the cake, the dresses your bridesmaids will actually wear. Wedding Color Studio is a small product that solves that one problem really well: you pick your colors, and it shows you your whole wedding in them.
Try it live → colors.davidsbridal.com
One simple problem, three kinds of users
I built it to meet people wherever they are in the process:
- Couples who already have their palette and just want to see it come to life.
- Couples with a color or two who need a nudge toward what pairs well.
- People who are just playing — browsing pretty combinations for fun and stumbling into something they love.
The whole thing is designed so none of those three feels like the wrong way to start.
What it actually does
You pick up to five colors — from a curated set of swatches or your own — and the app turns that into a few things that each feel like their own little gift:
- It names your palette. “Midnight Desert Rose,” “Modern Coastal Blues” — a real name that makes the combination feel like an identity, not a row of hex codes.
- It builds a mood board — a styled, editorial flat-lay in your colors, fabrics and florals and all, the kind of thing you’d screenshot and send to your planner.
- It imagines your day — a six-scene vision board (ceremony, table, bouquet, cake, invitation, wedding party), each rendered in your palette.
- It shows you the dresses — real David’s Bridal bridesmaid dresses that match your colors, so inspiration turns into something you can actually shop.
How we used AI — and where we didn’t
The easy version of this is “type colors, get an image.” The interesting part was using AI differently depending on what each moment needed. Naming is a language problem, so the name comes from a model coached to write like a stylist, not a paint catalog. The mood board and vision board are image generation, but steered hard toward looking like real wedding photography — varied people, believable settings, none of the tell-tale AI weirdness. The dress lineup isn’t AI at all; it’s a real product feed. The work was matching each job to the right tool instead of forcing everything through one. A lot of that was invisible — getting the images to feel like a magazine and not a slot machine took real tuning — but that’s the part the user never has to think about, which is the point.
Why a mood board and a vision board
This is the product decision I’m happiest with. Generating six high-quality scenes takes a moment, and if everyone had to wait for all six before seeing anything, a lot of people would bounce. So I split it. The mood board is free and instant — a taste. It gives you that first “oh, this is gorgeous” moment right away, no strings. The full six-scene vision board is the bigger payoff, still free, but opt-in: you give an email to unlock it. That does two things at once — it makes the heavier generation feel like a deliberate upgrade instead of a slow load, and it gives David’s Bridal a way to keep talking to a couple who just showed exactly what their wedding looks like. Same images, very different feeling, depending on how you frame the wait.
Tying it back to the dresses
The moment a couple finishes their vision board, they don’t just get left admiring pictures. The wedding-party scene — their colors, on real-looking people in varied dresses — becomes a full-bleed banner with a “Shop Now” button that drops them into David’s Bridal, already filtered to bridesmaid dresses in their palette. It works because it doesn’t feel like an ad: they’re already looking at their colors on actual dresses, so shopping is just the natural next step. That’s the quiet business goal of the whole thing — inspiration that leads somewhere.
The small decisions that add up
Most of what makes a product feel good is invisible:
- Surfacing options without overwhelming. There’s a lot the app could throw at you. The design works to show one good next step at a time instead of a wall of choices.
- It gets better the more it’s used. Every time someone generates from a palette we haven’t seen before, we save it to a public “Get Inspired” feed — so the people just here to browse are looking at real combinations other couples created, and the library grows on its own.
- Even the alt text is doing a job. The description we feed the AI to make an image becomes that image’s alt text — so what you see and what a screen reader (or Google) reads match exactly. A tiny thing that makes the product more accessible and more discoverable for free.
- Everything’s shareable. Your palette lives in the link itself, and a couple taps export it sized right for Instagram, Pinterest, wherever — because the first thing anyone does with something they love is send it to someone.
The point
Wedding Color Studio is a simple product with a simple promise: tell us your colors, we’ll show you your wedding. Everything underneath — the AI, the curation, the free-then-opt-in flow, the shoppable ending — exists to make that one promise feel effortless. That’s the whole game: take something genuinely hard for a couple to picture, and make it feel like it took no effort at all.