Dell subsidiary Alienware Australia heads into storefronts through resellers

Established in Miami, US in 1996, Alienware manufactures desktop, notebook, media centres and enterprise systems. Alienware’s logo can be seen in marketing campaigns at Sydney and Melbourne airport.

Matthew Early, general manager Alienware told CRN the vendor has been looking at the local channel market for quiet some time.

“We distribute our products through an online presence in the Australia and New Zealand region. However we have found that local customers want to look, touch and play around with products before they part with a lot of money for a product,” said Early.

According to Early, Alienware plans to only partner with resellers that will get the same sort of traffic as its online store.

“We are looking for resellers with like-minded customers. Our customers are mostly high-end gamers and in the corporate market. The idea is to get these guys to go to the resellers store, look at the Alienware products and then build a machine with the reseller online,” he said.

Early said Alienware has already signed a couple of resellers onto its channel program. It hopes to have at least 25 to 50 resellers joining the program.

“We have signed a reseller on the Gold Coast and one in Sydney. We aren’t ready to release those details just yet. We don’t want shop front presence just for the sake of it, we only want to be in a store if the products will add value to the customer,” said Early.

He claimed that there were a lot of expressions of interest from resellers about the program, because Alienware provides healthier margins than the larger hardware brands.

“We aren’t going through the mass merchant retail chain, so resellers won’t feel the squeeze on their margins,” he said.

Although Alienware in the US has one storefront owned by the vendor in Miami, Alienware Australia has no plans to open its own stores.

“For an Apple-like philosophy you need to have a very large capital investment and that is not sitting on the horizon. We have found that in this region resellers have more of an established base with the end-user,” he said.