HEAD OF MARKETING
Mercha — Sydney, hybrid (3 days a week in the office), full time
MAKE MERCHA THE CATEGORY LEADER. THEN PROVE IT WITH DEMAND.
Most marketing jobs give you a product, or a platform, or a service. This one gives you all three. Mercha makes real products people hold, keep and wear. It runs the technology that lets a brand order, manage and send them. And it wraps both in the human service that makes it land. You get to market the whole thing, and to decide what category leadership looks like for a brand that is arguing something nobody else in Australia is arguing yet.
THE SITUATION
Branded merch is a A$127 billion global industry and no company holds more than 2% of it. Most of what gets sold is cheap, forgettable and headed for landfill. A national brand has five offices ordering from five suppliers, four versions of the logo and three different purples. A people and culture manager is hand packing forty welcome packs on a Sunday because forty people start Monday.
Mercha exists to fix that. We turn merch from a scramble into something a brand controls, design to doorstep, for tech, SaaS, fintech and professional services companies across Australia. We call it brand infrastructure. The category has never had a leader. It is there to be taken.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Two jobs, one person. Make Mercha the name people reach for when they think about merch done properly: the brand, the argument, the visibility in search and in AI answers, the presence at the events and in the communities where our buyers already are. And turn that into demand: new customers finding us, existing customers coming back and buying more.
You have something most marketers never get. Real product to photograph, film and put in people's hands. Real clients whose events, welcome packs and launches are the story. A platform and a service that make the argument true. The raw material is all here. What it needs is one person, full time, with the judgement to set the direction and the hands to ship it every week.
WHAT YOU WOULD DO
Set the plan and run it. Own the calendar, the budget and the numbers. Ship every week. Report straight on Friday, change the plan on Monday. Test, measure, keep what works and kill what does not.
Build the brand's claim to the category. Positioning, voice, thought leadership, and a presence in the places buyers are looking: Google, ChatGPT, LinkedIn, the events and communities our customers belong to.
Generate demand from both ends. Named-account programmes with sales for new customers. Lifecycle, reactivation and range news for the customers we already have.
Direct the content. Brief the content agency for the planned work and hold them to the Mercha standard. Capture the rest yourself: a client event, a warehouse pack-out, a welcome kit being opened, live the same night. Real product with real people is the content that works for us, and you have access to both.
Build the AI stack. Research, copy, design, video, reporting, automation. One person producing what a three-person team did two years ago, with every workflow written down so the business keeps it.
Hold the brand line. Nothing brand-facing goes out without your sign-off. Founders have ideas and sales has urgent requests. You take the good ones and say no to the rest.
WHO DOES THIS WELL
Someone who has run a marketing function or owned a full plan and budget, most likely in a startup or small business where there was nobody else to do it. Seven years or more, and the judgement to set direction and make a call without anyone senior to check with.
Someone who already works AI-first and can show what the stack produced. Who writes clearly, is confident with a camera and a phone, and would rather run five small experiments than argue about one big idea. Who manages agencies as a client, not a colleague. Who reports a number that went down without dressing it up.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE APPLYING
You are the most senior marketer in the business. You report to the CEO, who backs you in the room and stays out of the way. You have offshore production support, a search partner and a content agency. Nobody else. Three days a week in the Sydney office, because you cannot judge a sample over Zoom. It is a lot for one person. That is the point, and it is why the authority is what it is.
THE ROLE AT A GLANCE
- Reports to: CEO
- Location: Sydney, hybrid, three days a week in the office
- Type: Full time, permanent
- Experience: 7+ years in marketing, at least 2 running a function or owning a full plan and budget
- Direct reports: None to start; offshore production support
- Works closely with: CEO, sales, Product Curator, search and paid partner, content agency
- Tools: HubSpot, Klaviyo, Google Analytics and Shopify, or close equivalents
TO APPLY
Send a CV and a short note to ben@mercha.com.au.
Not a cover letter. Tell us about one plan you ran end to end: what you wanted to happen, what happened, what you killed along the way, and which parts you built with AI.
Then answer one question.
You have real products, real clients and a warehouse full of both. How would you create high quality content if you did not? We ask because the answer tells us how you think, and because here you will never have that excuse.
Fly your flag.
