Our Story

The Story of the Mod Jingle

Let’s set the stage. The year is 1996. Lee Hitow and his wife Katie have grown their Modernistic franchise from one to twenty trucks out on the road each day. When they started their business, Katie would answer phones and schedule appointments for customers while Lee would go out and clean the carpet, day and night!

Through a commitment to over-the-top, wow-worthy service that people couldn’t stop talking about, the business grew and grew. So much so, that Lee couldn’t keep up with maintaining all twenty trucks himself. He had worked out a deal with a local car dealership where he would sometimes take vans to be worked on.

One day, Lee went to pick up a van from the shop when one of the dealership salesmen stopped him and asked to show him something. Always up for making new friends, Lee obliged and the salesman explained that he had worked on a little something with his garage band that he thought was worth a listen. They climbed in the van and he popped in a cassette and played a recording of the Jingle for Lee.

Catchy, sure, but was it the right move for the business? Lee asked to take the cassette tape home to show Katie. After a weekend of listening to the Jingle, and not being able to stop singing it themselves, Lee and Katie decided to give it a whirl. They called down to the local radio stations and had them switch all of their spots out for 30 straight seconds of the Modernistic Jingle.

The phones rang off the hook! But not just with customers scheduling appointments. The radio stations also called to say they were receiving calls from listeners threatening to boycott the station if they didn’t stop playing the Jingle. This rattled Lee & Katie, as their commitment is first and foremost to customer delight, but the results were undeniable. In only a few years, their business doubled in size again. The other Modernistic locations across the state started playing the Jingle too!

The Jingle was an undeniable earworm that made people remember to schedule their carpet cleaning! When the Hitow children got on the bus each morning, the kids sang the Jingle the rest of the way to school. When Lee or Bob would run into fellow Michiganders on their travels around and even out of the country, people would sing the Jingle. To this day, when Modernistic vans are stopped in traffic, customers roll down their windows for a spontaneous sing-along.

The Jingle represents the American Dream – with hard work, focus, creativity, and fun, anything is possible. Thank you for sharing in our nostalgia for this very proud moment in Modernistic History!