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About the company
A company named
after a standard.
Top Hat was not named after a person or a place. It was named after an era when the quality of a man’s work was the only thing standing behind it.
Where the name came from
Why “Top Hat”.
The name took days to land on. Every generic option had already been used by someone else, which is the trouble with generic: everybody thinks of it.
The answer did not come from thinking about names at all. It came from thinking about how this company was going to be run, and what was going to stand behind it.
Back when men wore top hats, the work was superb. And when it was not, the person who did it was back there fixing it. There were no phones and no apps. Business was done on a handshake and an agreement, and the relationship with the customer had to be excellent, because there was nothing else holding it together.
The same thing is true of what those men built. A house framed in 1964 is standing on lumber that was better than what gets sold today. Pull the nails out of one of those two by fours and it is worth keeping. That house will outlast one built in 2020.
Somewhere along the way, quality went out the window. A great many companies now measure the day in how much work they can take on, how fast they can get through it, and how much they can charge before the customer pushes back.
Top Hat was built to be the opposite of that.
And the gentleman in the logo?
He came out of the same instinct. Nineteen fifties advertising had a confidence that modern advertising gave up on: an ad from that era had to earn a second look, and it did, even when you had no interest in what it was selling.
He was assembled by hand, piece by piece, from favorite characters out of those old ads. The top hat from one, the thumbs up from another, then drawn together into the figure on the truck today. Everybody calls him Tim.
The Top Hat Standard
The part that is written down.
Everything above is the reason. This is the practice. It applies to every job, residential or commercial, whoever is wearing the hat.
We meet you at the door before anything comes off the truck
Introductions and a few minutes of conversation come first. You should never feel like you are interrupting the work by asking a question. At Top Hat, the person cleaning your carpet is also the customer service.
You walk us through, and you mark the problems
You show us the rooms, the traffic lanes, the spot the dog found. Every carpet is treated as heavily soiled regardless. The areas you point out get more time on top of that.
Your home is protected, not just your carpet
Corners guarded, furniture handled with care, everything set back where it belongs. Service exceeding all expectations, while maintaining the utmost respect for you and your property.
The method is matched to the fiber, not to the schedule
Low moisture liquid dry cleaning handles most work. Hot water extraction is used only where soil has genuinely reached the padding, because oversaturating carpet is what takes years off its life.
You inspect it while the equipment is still in the house
You are asked to walk the whole job before anything gets loaded. If an area needs another pass, it gets another pass. No job is finished until you say it is.
You get a straight answer, even when it costs us the job
If we do not believe something will come out, you hear that before we start, not after. Plenty of estimates end with us telling somebody their carpet does not need us yet.
The owner
Tim Lazaris
Tim spent about ten years as a welder, five of them at one company where he did well enough to be told no. He had asked to move into a sales role. They told him he was too valuable on the shop floor to move anywhere.
He took that as the answer he needed. What he actually wanted was to work with his hands and meet people on the same day, and to see somebody’s reaction to work he had put everything into.
His father-in-law had spent thirty six years building one of the larger carpet cleaning operations in Wisconsin, thirty two employees strong, and offered him something more useful than a leg up: no accounts, not one, but every piece of wisdom he had. Tim took a part-time job at a heating and cooling facility to cover the gap while the business found its feet. He needed it for six weeks.
Five years on, the company is his and the standard is his. He will tell you plainly that the long days are not about the business. They are about his wife and his girls, and about making sure money is never the reason his kids cannot go where they want to go in life.
He is equally plain about the rest of it. He gave this company to the Lord before the first job was ever booked, and he still starts every morning the same way, asking God to guide him through the day and carry him through whatever it brings.
A job we are proud of
The stain three companies walked away from.
A customer’s son juiced turmeric root. It did not agree with him, and it came back up on her beige bedroom carpet: a highlighter yellow stain, the most difficult color in the business to deal with.
Three companies had already told her the same thing. Replace the carpet. Which meant breaking down the bed, hauling the dressers out through a bedroom doorway, and paying for a whole new floor over one spot.
We were honest with her before starting. Turmeric is a staining agent. Once it reaches the dye sites in the fiber it is not coming out, and there was a real chance she would be replacing the carpet anyway. She was simply glad somebody was going to try.
Hours went into that spot and it still was not right. It was clean, but the turmeric had dyed the fiber itself. At that point the easy thing would have been to take the payment she was already happy to hand over and leave.
Instead she was told not to replace the carpet yet. A few days later we came back with different products, and a different approach: collapse the molecules in the turmeric so the color cannot show. That is what worked. You cannot tell there was ever a spot there.
The award
2026 Community’s Choice Award
Voted Milwaukee Top Choice, Best Carpet & Rug Cleaning Company. Chosen by the community, on top of a perfect 5.0 rating across 32 Google reviews.
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