Merry Christmas - Of Wreaths and Roses

We’ve enjoyed watching folks react to our aggressive marketing and pricing promotions.

Recently, Deelip Menezes, blogged about Alibre Design Vs. SolidWorks in response to a blog posting by “Gabi”. He also wrote a blog post showing how to create a Christmas wreath with SolidWorks that he used to substantiate his comparison.

We couldn’t resist the temptation to reproduce his Christmas Wreath model in Alibre Design. I forwarded his blog link to our marketing and engineering departments and within minutes had several versions of an Alibre modeled Christmas Wreath.  The Alibre model (enhanced with Hypershot, which is included with Alibre Design Professional and Expert) is on the top and the SolidWorks model is below.

Frankly, I like ours better, but admittedly I am biased toward Alibre and undoubtedly Deelip or another SolidWorks user could create a better-looking wreath than either of these.

We must be getting under SolidWorks skin though, given the defensiveness of some of the blog comments. They want to turn the discussion into a feature war as a tactic to avoid the truth, which is that SolidWorks is overpriced and bloated with unnecessary features that most people don’t need, can’t master, and won’t use. They belittle our marketing, but their complaints just prove its effectiveness. People are talking about Alibre; we are generating interest and controversy.

They also complain about our pricing, but fail to see that our price promotions are deliberate and effective. We are systematically testing different price points to determine price elasticity. This is a proven technique. If you were to keep track of every offer we ever made, they may appear to be rapid and random. However, it looks completely different to the 99% of new leads we get every month. Our pricing promos are intended for these new prospects.

We have 10’s of thousands of customers that swear by Alibre Design for their professional and personal design and manufacturing projects. Our pricing promotions won us thousands of additional customers. They tell us that Alibre Design is powerful, but easy to use and easy to learn. It does what they need and often pays for itself in the first project completed.

The economy is just starting to come out of the worst recession since the Great Depression, but millions of workers are still unemployed or underemployed. Everyone else is still worried about their jobs and the economy. Frugality has replaced luxury as the mantra of purchasers from corporate managers to soccer dads.

Alibre has had a great year, thanks to our customers and our employees. We added a record number of new customers and set new records in sales and profitability. Our financial outlook has never been better.

So what better Christmas present could Alibre give engineers and designers than a powerful, affordable 3D CAD program that they can use to turn their product dreams into reality, and perhaps grow a business, start a new one, or just build something cool that they are proud of.

Merry Christmas from Alibre!