Minibrand man blows smoke for RJR.

• Position: Moonlight Tobacco Co. founder Dirk Herrman

Moonlight Tobacco Co. founder Dirk Herrman sells smokes, but his inspiration is beer brands such as Red Dog, Icehouse and Southpaw. All are brewed by the quaint-sounding Plank Road Brewery, and indirectly, that's Herrman's competition - Philip Morris owns Miller Brewing, which owns Plank Road.

Moonlight Tobacco brands such as Politix and North Star are unfamiliar, but the concept isn't. "Stealth selling" is the '90s take on brand recognition. Saturn has GM behind it, Red Wolf has Anheuser-Busch, and Moonlight has New York-based RJR Nabisco. Orders are shipped from Advance, where Moonlight is nominally based, but production is by Winston-Salem-based R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., where Herrman has his offices.

Herrman, 36, is an "Army brat" born in Munich, Germany. His family returned to the States a year later, then moved around before settling in Odenton, Md., long enough for him to go through high school. He says he always loved packaging and commercials, and he got into advertising as soon as he got out of Northwestern in 1981. He worked in Chicago on brands such as Coast, Coors and Glade, then joined Reynolds in 1991 and moved up to senior marketing manager for Salem, Vantage, More and Now.

But Herrman found cigarette packaging boring. "Virtually every other consumer-product category uses package art in a dynamic way," he says. "Cigarette packaging hasn't been changed in 30 or 40 years." He took some ideas to...