WiCT Legacy Award Honorees Share Career Lessons and Industry Predictions in New Video Panel
Seven 2026 Women in Consumer Technology Legacy Award recipients talk about career advice, industry shifts, and where custom integration is headed
Women in Consumer Technology presents a new video panel with seven of its 2026 Legacy Award honorees, recognized at CEDIA Expo 2026. The panel is hosted by Kat Wheeler, Strategic Director and co-principal of TIG Global PR, and the full conversation is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ytm7X7rOQZg
The panel features Lori Runco, Wendy Feldstein, Heather McMillen, Sarah Dresher, Wendy Griffiths, Jamie Pasley, and Michelle Ferlauto. Together, they bring experience across engineering, operations, sales and vendor leadership, e-commerce, and global association work. Their careers include co-founding Runco in 1987, earning more than 70 patents, founding LIT to connect integrators with architects and designers, running operations at SoundVision, building CEDIA’s international membership, and more than 20 years of vendor-dealer partnerships.
Over the hour, the panel covers:
- Early career advice that turned out to be wrong, and the gear they would never recommend today
- Where the gap between integrators, architects, and designers still causes friction on projects
- Product innovation the industry may be overlooking
- Regulatory and operational issues dealers should be watching
- Common misconceptions about e-commerce and direct-to-consumer in a dealer-driven industry
- How the home theater category has changed since the 1980s
- What US companies may not appreciate about growing the industry internationally
- What separates a vendor-dealer partnership that works from one that only looks good on paper
- Advice for their younger selves and predictions for the industry
Watch the panel: https://youtu.be/ytm7X7rOQZg
Women in Consumer Technology: https://womeninconsumertechnology.org/
