How Lorrie Mizuko Built a B2B eCommerce Career by Saying Yes to the Unfamiliar

Lorrie Mizuko did not grow up with a clear picture of where she was headed. Her family expected something defined, something with a title people recognized. What she found instead was a career shaped by curiosity, built through relationships, and advanced by a willingness to take on roles she had never done before.

Today, Lorrie Mizuko is VP of Digital Marketing at ADI Global Distribution, a massive B2B distribution company and the 2025 B2B eCommerce Industry Award winner in the enterprise distribution category. Mizuko joined the B2B eCommerce Association's B2B E-commerce Show for a conversation with host Sarah Falcon as part of the Women in B2B eCommerce series.

A Career Built on Adjacent Moves

Mizuko's path to B2B eCommerce did not follow a straight line. It started in traditional retail, moved through agency work, passed through a major consumer electronics manufacturer, and eventually landed in distribution. At each step, she made a deliberate choice to expand into something unfamiliar.

Her first digital role came through a connection she made while working in stores. From there she joined a digital marketing agency founded by the original team that built Target.com, then moved to HTC, where she owned North American online sales for mobile and led the direct-to-consumer global launch of virtual reality technology across 20 countries.

Discomfort as a Signal, Not a Warning

When Mizuko joined Resideo, the Honeywell spin-off that is ADI's parent company, she took on a full-stack digital transformation effort she had never led before. "When they talked about digital transformation, I thought, 'Well, I haven't done that yet,'" she said. "It was an opportunity to stretch and be uncomfortable, knowing that would grow you."

"There's always something that you can take away from something you've done before that will lead you down a curated path," she said. "A lot of these things I hadn't done before, but it felt like something I'd seen before." When she moved to ADI, the challenge shifted again: B2B eCommerce at that scale, with thousands of price books and complex credit-on-account structures, was new territory. "Being uncomfortable is when you're growing," she said.

The Art of Asking the Right Question

"I spend a good part of my day asking questions to figure out how we're going to solve a problem," she said. "Starting out with, 'What is the problem that we're trying to solve?' Often people come to me saying they need to send an email tomorrow, but when you ask what they are trying to solve, it usually ends up that we don't need to send that email."

She is skeptical of rigid playbooks. "Every audience is different. You should be open to the possibilities that you're going to have to modify or change it and be willing to walk away from a solution because it just didn't work."

Networking Without Being an Extrovert

Mizuko is direct about her own tendencies: she is not naturally an extrovert. But she built the skill deliberately, starting with a bartending job in college that forced her to be comfortable talking to strangers. "Networking is about putting yourself out there at in-person events and cultivating those relationships over time, whether it's through LinkedIn or a periodic note. It's so critical to work at it, and anyone can do it. You don't need to be an extrovert."

What It Means to Be a Woman in B2B eCommerce

"As a woman in technology, I've definitely been in rooms where I'm the only woman," she said. "It's not very common for women to be in leadership positions on the more technical side, but you have to build that second skin and show that you know what you're talking about."

"What I love about B2B is that because everybody's still learning, everybody is super open to having the conversation and asking, 'How would you solve this?' One of the biggest disruptors making people have their guard down right now is AI."

ADI's Digital Ambitions and the Simplicity Mandate

"The theme for my team this year is: everything that we're doing should be with the mindset of how do I make my customer's life easier," she said. "We should make it a one-click purchase in the future." Building a purchasing experience that handles complex catalogs, negotiated pricing, and varied fulfillment requirements without burdening the customer is a significant engineering and design problem — and, increasingly, a competitive differentiator.

What the Path Looks Like

The arc of Mizuko's career is not a story about having a plan. It is a story about having a method. She asked questions. She expanded into adjacent spaces. She took roles that made her uncomfortable because discomfort was a reliable signal that growth was ahead. And she built a network, deliberately and consistently, even though it did not come naturally.