Brings up a thought and a couple of questions to me.
Should there generally be room for mark-up in the price from artists creating for printers?
Do most printers mark up the art they hire out?
I think that answer is going to be as consistent as pricing a print of 100 shirts 1 color front and back. You're going to get a different perspective and costing from everyone. We've seen the same shirt order (price check) range from 4.70-6.25 from 20 different printers. For this reason, as it pertains to art, you will see a (a different mark up) from 10 printers and 10 that don't mark it up at all.
I do tho, see the business thought behind marking the price up. When you buy an item, you have a % added into that cost so that you are "profitable", like blank goods. Oddly enough, I've heard of some people not even marking up the shirt at all...but they have a high print cost. I think no matter the recipe you use, you still need to build in markup (somewhere) for most all expenses or you will be out of business eventually. So why not mark up art? The only reason I can see, is because art can be all over the place for pricing. It's most often based on how much time is needed in a job.
As we all know, to charge a flat rate on art is great for quoting purposes, but never really good for profit. You may quote 5 hours on a job (you don't want to quote too high) or it will scare the customer. If you have a staff artist, paid them 20.00 per hr and charged the customer 25.00 per hour on a job for art services, and that job required 20 hours of work, but only 100 shirts, it becomes very difficult to charge the flat rate. Printers who have staff artist, often under quote art charges (based on estimated art ours to complete) to show a low cost for quoting purposes. I've seen more often than not, printers capping the art charge to 5 hours max and eating the rest if they go over, applying that added cost as a cost of doping business.
In light of that road I took above, I'd have to say no, It's my opinion, there should not generally be room for mark up on art charges. Let me say that I think this applies more toward (custom or creative) as well as high end art services.
The only time I could see marking up the art cost is when that cost is consistently on the lower end, like $25-$100 art charges. As in, (everything you did) pertaining to art, was a consistent price and time involved. Some artist work strictly in vector art (and master the use of clip art) and are more geared towards being an outside "production artist" versus a custom potentially hand drawn creative artist or one that specializes in high end seps. I've seen some shops (always) charge a flat rate of $50.00 for art. Never below or above. As a result, they can gear their artist searches for those that cater more towards production art type work and the printer can know that their art (cost) will always be either right at $50.00 or below.
