Brooke Logan did not set out to work in B2B eCommerce. Her degree is in biology. Her early career took her through home improvement retail. She ended up leading B2B product management at Lowe’s mostly because no one else wanted the role.
“I took on the role of product manager for B2B really because no one else wanted to do it,” she told me. “And honestly, I’ve enjoyed it ever since.”
That origin story is not unusual in this field. What followed it is more distinctive. Logan is now Director of Omni Experience at Genuine Parts Company, the parent company of NAPA Auto Parts and Motion Industries, where she leads eCommerce experiences, store experiences, customer data, and sales technology across one of the largest parts distribution networks in the world. Her work sits at the intersection of unified commerce, deep customer research, and the kind of organizational change management that determines whether a digital strategy actually gets executed or stalls out in committee.
I spoke with Logan at the B2B eCommerce World Americas. Her perspective on journey mapping, customer accessibility, and what it takes to move a large enterprise forward is grounded, practical, and worth unpacking.
From Home Improvement to Auto Parts: Why the Pro Customer Is Familiar Territory
Logan came to Genuine Parts Company with a long background in home improvement retail, including time at Lowe’s and HD Supply. She was candid about initially wondering whether auto parts would feel different. It did not, in the ways that matter most.
“I have realized that auto parts is highly similar in a lot of ways,” she said. “When we think about especially the pro personas and the situations that people are in, it’s just very similar. People are shopping for their job, they’re needing to order things kind of day in, day out. It’s not a long trajectory of a purchase decision.”
That framing, the pro customer as someone making fast, job-dependent decisions with real consequences attached, shapes how Logan thinks about the digital experience her team builds. A repair shop owner ordering a brake caliper is not browsing. They have a vehicle on the lift and a customer waiting. The experience needs to be fast, accurate, and confidence-building, in that order.
“A lot of those features are pretty similar whether you’re a construction company or you’re a repair shop,” she said. “Very similar.”
Emotion Is Not Optional in B2B Commerce
One of Logan’s most useful contributions to the conversation is her insistence that B2B buying is emotional, even when, and especially when, it involves practical, job-driven purchases. The emotions are just different from the ones that drive a consumer adding something to a wish list.
I raised the idea that B2B buying is often framed as purely rational, driven by specs and procurement workflows, while B2C is treated as emotional. Logan pushed back on the assumption.
“I do think that it’s a lot of ‘am I getting the right thing that I need in auto parts?’ That is really acute because a part fits a specific vehicle,” she said. “I know that if someone buys the wrong part, there are large implications to that because there’s a customer that’s depending on them to do something and they’re going to let their customer down. So there’s a lot wrapped up in that.”
Fulfillment anxiety is the second emotional current she identified. “Do they really have the part and are they really going to get it to me when they say they’re going to? So that fulfillment piece is really fraught.”
Those two emotions, accuracy anxiety and fulfillment anxiety, are not abstract. They are the feelings that drive abandonment, erode trust, and create the opening for a competitor to win a customer relationship. Logan’s team works backward from them.
Journey Mapping Across Three Layers
To understand where those emotional friction points originate and how they connect to the digital experience, Logan’s team built a customer journey map with three distinct layers. The structure is worth understanding because it captures a level of complexity that single-layer mapping typically misses.
“The first layer was actually the driver that’s kind of going through this emotional process because they need to have their car repaired,” she explained. “The second layer is our primary customer, which is the B2B customer, the repair shop. And it’s, okay, how does their journey overlay with the driver’s? And then the last layer is our stores. And so we have to ask what’s happening at the store and where are those friction points?”
The output is a map that shows how pressure at one layer traces back to its source at another. “You can see a lot of overlaps between the things that are causing friction at the very top and where those originally originate down at the very bottom,” she said. “That’s the thing that we always point back to.”
The practical result is a prioritization tool. Logan’s team has finite resources, and the journey map gives them a principled way to decide which problems to solve. “We have to rigorously prioritize what those things are,” she said, combining qualitative customer research with analytics to make the case for where to invest. The goal, always, is to trace the work back to actual revenue impact.
The Accessibility Problem Nobody Talks About
When I asked Logan what surprises her most when she talks to customers, her answer was not what I expected. It was not about generational change or shifting expectations. It was about the customers who are not keeping pace with digital at all.
“I’m probably most shocked if I speak to a customer who is barely using technology,” she said. She described a challenge her team is actively navigating: a meaningful percentage of Genuine Parts Company’s customers are using web browsers so outdated that the modern website cannot support them. Some are still on browsers older than Internet Explorer 11.
“You have to understand that because otherwise we’re going to isolate a group of our customers that we really need to serve very well,” she said. “And I think we have to remember that when we’re building.”
This is a form of digital accessibility that rarely makes it into conference presentations, and it points to something important about B2B eCommerce that is easy to overlook when the conversation focuses on leading-edge personalization and AI-driven recommendations. The sophistication of the platform is irrelevant if the customer cannot access it.
The implication for digital transformation strategy in distribution and manufacturing is real. Modernization plans that do not account for the full distribution of customer capabilities risk leaving a significant customer base behind, which is both a revenue problem and a relationship problem.
Change Management at Scale: The Hardest Part of the Job
Logan’s most candid moments in our conversation were about change management, specifically the difficulty of getting large organizations to move in a new direction when the people who need to change are distributed, distant from the vision, and operating on deeply ingrained habits.
She described a straightforward-sounding initiative that became surprisingly contentious: requiring every customer who registers on the website to provide a unique email address. The logic is self-evident from a digital commerce perspective. The ability to contact customers, help them reset passwords, and build direct relationships depends on having accurate contact information. But the habit among sellers had been to register customers themselves, using made-up addresses or their own emails.
“To get everyone to understand why we would want to push this change forward, we have taken so much blowback because the sellers, this is what the sellers want to do and it’s what their habit is,” she said. “They haven’t been exposed to the vision and why we want to make sure that your customers are giving us their own information.”
The broader pattern she described maps to something recognizable to anyone working inside a large enterprise: executive alignment is achievable because the audience is small and the story can be told directly. The harder problem is the organizational middle, the sales teams and store associates who are numerous, distributed, and rarely in the room when the vision is presented.
“It’s typically not executive level friction because there’s fewer people, so it’s easier to tell that story and paint the vision,” she said. “It’s more when you get to orgs like the sales department or store associates that there’s just a large scale. You don’t have an opportunity to talk to them one-on-one.”
For Logan, the solution starts with seeing the problem clearly. “I can look at the situations that we’re in and really create a perspective and a strategy and have a really clear vision of how I think it should work,” she said. “But getting everyone else, especially in large enterprise, there are so many people that you need to get to buy into your vision to really push a change forward and push it forward successfully.”
Research First, Then Build
One thing that came through in our conversation is how foundational customer research is to Logan’s process, not as a box to check before development begins, but as an ongoing discipline that shapes what gets built and what gets deprioritized.
Her team uses a triple diamond approach to product development, an expansion of the standard double diamond framework used in design thinking, that explicitly separates the problem definition phase from the solution phase and builds concept testing into both. The goal is to avoid the common trap of building solutions to problems that have not been fully understood, or to problems that customers describe differently than product teams assume.
“We do a lot of customer research and concept testing, and that’s so built into our process,” she said. “But I forget that not everyone actually does that.”
That combination of upfront research and structured concept testing before committing to a build is a discipline that scales well in complex B2B environments, where the cost of building the wrong thing is high and the customer relationships at stake are long-term.
On Being a Woman in a Male-Dominated Industry
Logan has spent her career in industries where women in leadership have been a minority: home improvement, industrial distribution, and auto parts. She is thoughtful about what that experience has taught her, and direct about what she has stopped waiting for.
“Certainly my entire career I’ve been in very male-dominated industries,” she said. “That said, I think that I’ve had a good balance of male counterparts and male leaders who didn’t treat me any differently. And maybe because of their own situations of having strong women in their lives who are also running their own career very capably.”
A particularly formative experience came at HD Supply, where she worked for a woman leader whose example she has carried since. “She set a strong example of what it was like to bring your whole self to work. And to be vulnerable. I think that vulnerability is what has actually served me the best.”
The confidence Logan describes now is not the product of titles or tenure alone. It is the product of deciding not to wait. “I have the confidence at this point that I’m not waiting on anyone to give me permission to do anything,” she said. “I think we can sit around for a long time waiting on men to give us permission to do something. And I know that I’m more capable than most of them have been. So I’m not going to sit here and wait for that.”
She added that she hopes others take the same example. “You don’t need to wait on anyone to give you permission.”
The conversation about women in B2B eCommerce is one that Logan engages with seriously. She was enthusiastic about the Women in B2B event at the conference, and her framing, that building relationships with each other is both professional strategy and personal sustenance, reflects what a growing community of practitioners has found to be true.
The Women in B2B eCommerce Community
The B2B eCommerce Association’s Women in B2B eCommerce program exists to create exactly the kind of connection and peer support that Logan describes. “I really think that the Women in B2B event last night was great,” she said. “It’s really important for us to continue building these relationships with each other.”
If you are a woman working in B2B eCommerce, or a digital leader looking to connect with peers navigating similar challenges, the Women in B2B eCommerce LinkedIn group is an active and growing community. You can connect with Brooke Logan on LinkedIn.
What the B2B eCommerce Community Gets Right
Logan came to the Americas B2B eCommerce World event in Scottsdale to keep a close pulse on the market, reconnect with peers, and find the ideas she had not yet stumbled upon herself. She described a lunchtime conversation with someone from one of Genuine Parts Company’s own business units where they discovered they were navigating remarkably similar challenges.
“That is very helpful to understand, even if for nothing but shared sympathy for each other,” she said. “But also understanding what someone else is going through and how you might tackle the same thing.”
She put it plainly: “You go to a B2B event, you’re like a celebrity. You can be so cool here.”
The observation captures something real about why this community is worth building. In most organizations, the person leading B2B digital commerce is working in relative isolation, selling a vision internally, navigating friction from people who do not fully understand why it matters. Events and networks that surface shared experience are not just professionally useful. They are structurally important for anyone trying to move the work forward.
For more on how B2B practitioners are building the skills and frameworks to advance their digital commerce strategy, the B2B eCommerce Association offers resources ranging from digital maturity assessments to practical roadmap tools.
Looking Ahead
Logan is running a complex operation: unified commerce across eCommerce, physical stores, customer data, and sales technology for a global enterprise. The work involves holding a long-term vision clearly enough to communicate it consistently, staying close enough to the customer to know when the vision needs adjusting, and building enough internal alignment to actually execute.
“I think that’s what I really like about it, actually,” she said, reflecting on the human complexity of the work. “It’s very human to figure out.”
That orientation, toward the people on both sides of the transaction, toward the repair shop owner who needs the right part fast and toward the sales rep who has been doing things a certain way for years, is what makes the difference between a digital strategy that looks good in a presentation and one that actually changes how business gets done.
The industry is fortunate to have practitioners like Logan who understand both sides of that equation and are willing to share what they have learned.