WINSLOW (AP) – A Winslow company that manufactures transport trailers for snowmobiles and ATVs has been sold to Thule Group, a deal seen as enhancing the Maine operation’s prospects for growth.

C&C Distributors Inc. has been renamed Thule Trailers and is being consolidated into the Swedish company known for bicycle racks, rooftop boxes and other load carriers for cars.

Bill Cleaves started C&C nine years ago in his garage in Liberty. The manufacturing operation, which posted $15 million in sales last year, is now based in a portion of the former Kimberly-Clark paper mill, where it employs 125 people.

Cleaves and his partner, Ed Cullivan – C&C comes from the first letter of their last names – say they have no plans to reduce their management role under the new ownership.

Thule acquired 80 percent of privately owned C&C for an undisclosed price and has an option to purchase the remaining shares over the next five years.

Cleaves and Cullivan said the purchase by Thule brings needed computer, accounting and legal expertise and can set the stage for expansion.

The company opened a plant last year in Jamestown, N.Y., with 10 employees, and the managers hope to eventually add a factory in the Chicago area and perhaps others along the Eastern seaboard. But the Winslow factory, they said, is here to stay because it makes good business sense to do so.

“We have an excellent labor force here,” said Cullivan, who has demonstrated that manufacturing can prosper in the region, despite a rash of layoffs and plant closings. “All those people from all those depressing stories you read in the newspapers have given us an opportunity to pick up quality workers,” he said.

Cleaves said he started the business because he couldn’t find a quality trailer for his snowmobile.

“I wasn’t going to spend my money for them,” he said. “So I built my own.”

A one-man operation in a garage is the most humble of startup businesses, but Cleaves had grand ambitions.

“It was my intention from the beginning to grow it and make it a national company,” he said.

Cleaves and Cullivan said they understood what snowmobile enthusiasts wanted in a trailer because both are avid snowmobilers. They also are owners and managers who understand the product that comes out of their factory.

More at home in blue jeans and work shirts than suits and ties, they can and have on occasion returned to the factory floor to build trailers.

“It took me a day to get in the swing of it again,” Cleaves said.

AP-ES-02-16-04 0217EST