Every year, the all digital, Denver-based Lightning Labels holds a Photo Contest for its customers. The aim of the contest is to serve as a reminder that business owners have never been more clever or inventive in their branding strategies. This annual event is a tribute to the creativity of Lightning Labels' customers, and the many ways they turn custom labels into works of art. The winning entries not only earned great prizes for themselves, they have also become inspiration for other companies wondering whether new custom labels are right for them, showing just how great products can look when they're decked out in high-quality designs printed by experts.

With congratulations to every company that entered the 2018 Photo Contest, the following brands have emerged as this year's Lightning Labels Photo Contest winners:

Grand Prize: Mad Viking LLC
Mad Viking's bold, mostly monochrome packaging for its beard care product line shows off the purpose of custom labels: making a brand's personality tangible. Black labels with white skeletal imagery and just a dash of red jump off the shelves, turning the day-to-day activity of beard care into an epic undertaking. For its efforts, Mad Viking won a 60-inch flatscreen HDTV, the grand prize of this year's photo contest. Other companies hoping to go for a rugged look can take inspiration from Mad Viking's artful blend of hardened imagery and standout fonts.

2nd Place: Fraktured Sauce
Giving a sinister and dark look to its "haunted harvest" flavor, Fraktured Sauce won second prize in this year's photo contest. The company's reward for creating and photographing such an impressive label is an Apple Watch. The Fraktured label has a multi-layered look, with a complex gray pattern giving way to red and orange lettering that almost seems to glow. As with Mad Viking, the designers have made excellent use of daring fonts that give the brand's sauce products an edgy and irresistible look.

3rd Place: Scents of Soy
Candle labels have their own complexities - for safety's sake, they have to be able to resist heat. Lightning Labels offers these specialized labels, and gives customers the ability to craft visuals that suit their candles' branding. Scents of Soy showed a great example of candle label design in this year, with its black-and-white "cowboy" and "cowgirl" candle labels. These designs used a simplified modern pallet alongside classic Western imagery, and earned the company third prize: A Polaroid instant-print camera.

4th and 5th Place: The Laughing Tree Organics and Olga's Organics
Fourth and fifth place in the labeling contest win credit for further Lightning Labels purchases, helping them keep their products looking compelling in the months and years ahead. This year, these prizes went to a pair of organic producers, The Laughing Tree Organics and Olga's Organics.