BUDK's owner and president, Clint Kadel, poses with United Cutlery's replica of The Staff of Gandalf from 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.'

Just south of Moultrie on Hwy. 319 sits a large warehouse building with the large red letters BUDK across the front.

BUDK, pronounced “BUD K,” is a locally owned, global business that continues to thrive despite these challenging economic times. What started as The BUDK Catalog in 1988 is now On The Edge, Inc. (OTE) an umbrella corporation that owns multiple retail catalogs and Web sites as well as one distribution brand: United Cutlery. OTE now mails more than 10 million catalogs a year and ships thousands of orders a day, employing more than 100 team members full time. President and owner Clint Kadel hopes to see that number continue to grow.

“We started small out of my grandmother’s garage just after I graduated from college. I had my fraternity brothers help me stuff flyers to sell knives and send to about 100 people. At first it was maybe just 1 or 2 orders a week, but we’ve grown to an average of more than 3,000 shipped orders a day during the month of December,” said Kadel.

The most exciting growth at OTE is United Cutlery, which was purchased out of bankruptcy by OTE in 1997. United’s expansive new product line of knives, tomahawks, survival gear and swords are really selling well, Kadel said, but it’s the movie replicas that United expects to see the most sales from in 2013.

“We’ve just acquired the license to produce officially licensed replicas of the just released ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,’ produced by Warner Brothers Film Co.,” Kadel said. “This is a huge deal for us because Warner Brothers only granted licenses to produce replicas to three companies worldwide. Before we acquired United, they also produced replicas of ‘The Lord of The Rings’ trilogy some ten years ago, and saw massive growth as a company during this time. We are hoping to see some of that same growth now, because ‘The Hobbit’ will also be a trilogy released one movie a year for the next three years.”

United Cutlery’s introductory line of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” replicas will include Sting: The Sword of Bilbo Baggins, Glamdring: The Sword of Gandalf the Grey, The Wizard Gandalf’s Staff, Orcrist: The Sword of Thorin Oakenshield, The Sword of Kili and The Sword of Fili. They expect to not only produce these from the first movie in the trilogy, but also many more, depending on each character’s popularity.

Kadel is so excited about license’s potential for the company that OTE is closing early next Thursday for a private showing of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” at the Moultrie Stadium Cinemas for all OTE employees.

“We expect this license to not only be beneficial to United Cutlery, but the community as a whole. We welcome the growth and the opportunity to hire more team members from Moultrie and surrounding communities,” said Kadel.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey premiered in theaters Friday. For more information about BUDK and The Hobbit check out their website at www.budk.com/hobbit.