BandJob

1.) If a client you offers to pay you, plus a percentage of a profit... well let's get real, it won't happen. 2.) If it does happen... I don't think you'll be the one deciding how much to "take" if they are offering, and if you are..you take as much as you can. 3.) If a client offers to pay you ONLY a percentage of the profits and doesn't not pay you for the work, in my opinion, that's a terrible business deal on your end, and bad practice. Most of the time you're lucky if a client even pays you at all, or in a timely matter, taking payment from profits...eh, I wouldn't. 4.) Why are you being offered a percentage of profits? I could be wrong here in the t-shirt world, as I don't do much of those, but in my years of working for lots clients, I have never been offered this.

Yeah, like iamdb said, if they're offering you a percentage of profits in leu of your normal fee, I wouldn't do it unless it's an established brand you know will sell well and you trust that they'll honestly report the profits to you. Even then I'd still ask for some kind of upfront money because depending on the brand's production schedule you might not see money from a profit share for a long time. You might also want to steer the conversion in the direction of a percentage of sales instead of profits. How much a brand profits on a design may have little do with your work. They could have printed way too many, used an expensive printer, shipped them from god knows where, etc. Also, how will they define what expenses are considered in order to calculate profit? Are they only considering printing the design, or also marketing, attending trade shows, etc? That would just get too messy in my opinion.

What others have said. The percentage in lieu of the normal fee is an excuse to pay you later. It's a way for them to get you to do all of the work up front and in a BEST CASE SCENARIO they drag their feet in paying you when the time comes. The mostly likely scenario is that they magically lose your email when you come knocking for money. Even though it's super fun to work with bands and many of them are honest, straight up guys who don't want to jerk you around...the sad fact is there are a lot of bands that are deadbeats. They all have excuses, but at the end of the day if they are unlabeled (which I am betting is the case here, as most bands that are labeled have no problem referring you to the label to cash in your invoice), they have a ton of expenses and the album art is the last thing in the world they want to deal with. Take half up front and don't start until you get that deposit or tell them to go screw.

its an extremely rare practice cause no one wants to keep track of that shit. in my 5 or so years of doing this professionally it has come up twice. 1 time it was garbage and the other time it ruled.