Distinctive Packaging is critical if you want your brands to stand out--whether they're on the crowded specialty food shelves at pet stores or at more conventional retailers. We needed pet owners to realize quickly that Oink-Oink products are something special, since pork products are basic commodity items.

The brightly colored cartoon characters on our packages usually are a pig and a dog in a funny setting. For example, a 50¢ package of Oinkerpucks, our cellophane-wrapped baked meatroll with slices the size of hockey pucks, shows a dog and a pig playing hockey in skating outfits. These designs have been an instant hit, especially with kids, who drive a lot of their parents' impulse buys.

I come up with the settings after talking to a few employees, including our national sales manager, our public relations manager and our in-house artist. We are all dog owners. Each week, we'll slam a few beers down and get creative. I don't see the need to do focus groups, because my instincts have never let me down. After the artist designs the packages, we contract with an outside company that produces them.

To increase sales, we do four special packages a year tied to holidays. For instance, at Christmas, we sell the $14.99 Winter Wonder Bone, a 14- to 16-inch smoked beef bone. Illustrated on the corrugated cardboard box is a Santa pig in a sleigh, dangling a bone in front of a dog dressed as a reindeer. Around Valentine's Day, we sell two pork hearts in a heart-shaped box for $2.99. True, that extra packaging increases production costs, but it's worth it.

Some of our products, such as pig ears and smoked bones, are bundled in red plastic net bags with the characters on a cardboard tag so that customers can smell and touch the items. They really do smell like bacon! We put moister items in plastic shrink-wrap in-side sturdy white cardboard boxes with big cutouts that let our buyers peek at the snacks.

Though we were probably the first company in the country to sell these kinds of quirky smoked-meat dog snacks, the competition is heating up. We're confident that our superior packaging will continue to work for us. The other guys' packages are drab by comparison, using only one color and no fun graphics.

In fact, people like our characters so much that I'm thinking about developing a line of Oink-Oink clothing. But right now our biggest goal is to get Oinkers in mass-merchandising stores like K Mart and Wal-Mart. We want to make sure that every dog in America has an Oinker on his plate. I think we will.