One platform, eight countries: How Merchantwise Group manages global employment without the admin overhead

About the business

Merchantwise Group is a Melbourne-based group of companies operating across two major business streams: brand licensing and digital media and marketing. The licensing division manages partnerships for global brands including Minecraft, Peppa Pig, Sonic the Hedgehog, Transformers and Coca-Cola. The media arm runs several specialist agencies covering creative, social, performance and full-service digital work. With over 160 employees including offshore staff, the group is actively global, with employees across France, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong and Spain.

Simon Black leads HR and people operations across the group. When it comes to international employment, HeroForce is now his default  and has been for some time.

The challenge

Before consolidating on HeroForce, international employment at Merchantwise was fragmented. Individual businesses within the group had found their own EOR providers, often by searching for a provider that covered a particular country. Some staff were on direct contracts that were more of a service provider arrangement than genuine employment. Others were employed through a separate EOR but still needed to be set up manually inside Employment Hero to keep records consistent.

For every international hire onboarded through a different provider, Simon had to create a separate account in Employment Hero and transfer the details across. Although being small tasks that would be 20 minutes here, half an hour there, it totaled hours of overhead per hire.

“It wasn’t a lot, but it’s lots of little bits of time. Half an hour here, 20 minutes there. If you add it up, it’d take hours.”

The deeper cost was the three-way coordination: managing the candidate, the external EOR and the Employment Hero setup simultaneously, rather than running everything through a single process.

The solution

Once Simon realised HeroForce was fully integrated into Employment Hero, the decision to consolidate was straightforward. The group has since moved the majority of its international employees across, and all new international hires go through HeroForce as standard.

“I can operate my team as one agency, even though we have hundreds of agencies around the world. The HeroForce team handles everything for us.”

Here’s how the process works for Simon day to day:

1.  Candidate identified.  Merchantwise runs its own recruitment. Simon manages the offer and terms directly.

2.  Request submitted.  Once terms are agreed, Simon submits the details to the HeroForce team. There’s no separate system or duplicate entry, everything happens inside the platform already in use across the group.

3.  Contract issued within 1–2 days.  The HeroForce team prepares a compliant employment contract for the relevant country and issues it to the candidate. Local representatives mean Simon gets responses quickly, without the time zone delays of dealing directly with offshore providers.

4.  Employee onboarded into the group.  Once signed, the new hire is live in Employment Hero alongside the entire Merchantwise team, accessible through performance tools, engagement feeds, the company directory and group-wide reporting from day one.

5.  Changes managed with a single email.  Raises, title changes, bonuses and benefit extensions are handled by submitting a request. HeroForce manages the paperwork; Simon manages the people.

“If we’re negotiating a pay rise or a promotion, we go through our normal process. But from a paperwork perspective, I just send off an email in the Employment Hero platform, and things get done. Contracts get drawn up, everything gets sorted.”

The ROI

• Contracts issued in 1–2 days across 8 international markets
• Hours saved per hire, no more manual setup, duplicate entry, or juggling multiple providers
• One payroll, one payment, replacing fragmented offshore vendors
• Full global visibility, every employee in one platform, across reporting, performance and comms
• Compliance handled end-to-end, local laws, tax and requirements managed without internal lift

“It just works. We really haven’t had any issues. When we do have them, they get resolved. The team’s responsive.”

Why it matters

For a group that operates across licensing deals, client services and multiple agency brands, the ability to hire on the ground wherever the business operates, quickly and without friction, is a genuine competitive advantage. Merchantwise doesn’t use HeroForce because it has no other options. It uses it because it works, and because consolidating international employment inside Employment Hero means the whole group stays connected, visible and manageable as it grows.

“Whenever we want to hire someone internationally, HeroForce is our first go-to. It’s seamless, it’s efficient, and it’s very hard to bring in an out-of-system provider when everything just works.”