People ask me this a lot. Probably more than any other single question about the business. Are you a Marine? Was the company founded by marines? Is this a veteran-owned thing?
The honest answer is no. I’m not a Marine. Never served. The name didn’t come from a personal military background. It came from sitting around in 2012 trying to think of a name that sounded right.
My first choice was actually “Army of Maids.” I liked it. It was direct, it said what it was, and it had a certain energy to it. The domain was available when I first found it. But I sat on it too long, and by the time I went to grab it, someone else had taken it (shout out to our friends at Army of Maids in Florida, who started the same year as us). That’s what I get for procrastinating. So I kept thinking. And at some point, “Maid Marines” just landed. It was catchy, it was easy to remember, and more importantly, it carried a set of associations that made sense for what I was trying to build. Precision, order, discipline, thoroughness. Those are qualities you’d want from the people cleaning your home, and “Marines” as a word carries all of that naturally.
That was the whole logic. Not a branding exercise, not a focus group, not some elaborate strategy. Just a guy starting a cleaning company who needed a name, and this one felt right.
But I wasn’t careless about it. Before I committed to anything, I ran the name past friends who had actually served in the Marines. I wanted to know if it would land wrong with people who had earned that word through real service. Every one of them gave me the go-ahead. They thought it was a good name. They didn’t find it disrespectful. If anything, they seemed to take it as a compliment that the word “Marines” conveyed exactly the qualities I was trying to associate with quality work.
That was enough for me to move forward. But then something happened that I wasn’t expecting.
Not long after I launched, I got an email from the trademark counsel for the U.S. Marine Corps. When you see something like that in your inbox, your stomach drops a little. I figured I was about to get told to change the name. But the email was actually pretty reasonable. He explained that the name itself was fine. We just couldn’t use USMC imagery, official Marine Corps motifs, or anything that would suggest an actual affiliation with the military branch. That made complete sense to me. We weren’t trying to look like an official Marine Corps operation. We were a cleaning service with a catchy name. He was respectful about it, even supportive, and that was that. Here’s the actual email.
I remember being genuinely relieved. Not because I was worried about getting in trouble, but because it confirmed something I’d been hoping was true. That you can borrow the spirit of a word without claiming the thing it literally refers to. The name “Maid Marines” isn’t saying we are Marines. It’s saying we aspire to the standard that word represents. And the people who actually hold that standard were fine with it.
There was one other moment worth mentioning. A while after launching, I got an email from a veteran who was pretty upset about the name. He felt it was disrespectful to use the word “Marines” for a cleaning company. He was direct about it, and I could tell it came from a real place.
I wrote back the same night. I explained the origin of the name, that I wasn’t a Marine, that I’d checked with friends who served, and that the trademark counsel had personally reviewed it and given the okay. I told him that the name was meant as a reflection of the qualities I admired most about the Marines, not an attempt to claim something I hadn’t earned. I offered him a significant discount on a cleaning as a small gesture of respect.
He wrote back and completely came around. We ended up having a really good conversation after that about his time served. That exchange probably meant more to me than the trademark counsel’s email, honestly. Because it wasn’t a legal opinion. It was a personal one. Someone who had earned the right to be offended heard the explanation and decided I was being genuine. That felt like the real test.
Since then, we’ve had a ton of Marine customers. And I’d be lying if I said none of them were surprised to find out the company wasn’t founded by a veteran. There’s usually a moment where I can tell they’re a little disappointed. But every single time, once I explain the story, they come around. The most common response is some version of “if my brothers approved, so do I.” That phrase, or something close to it, has come up more times than I can count.
I think about naming a lot, actually. Not just business names. All names. The name you give something shapes how people think about it before they know anything else. “Maid Marines” tells you something immediately. You hear it and you think clean, organized, precise, maybe a little intense about getting things right. Those are basically the qualities you want when someone is coming into your home to do a deep clean or set up a recurring service. The name does a lot of the work before we even show up.
A name doesn’t have to be a literal description of who you are. Sometimes it just needs to capture the right qualities. A law firm named after its founders isn’t telling you anything about the law. A restaurant called “The Blue Door” probably doesn’t have a blue door anymore. Names are containers for associations, and the associations people bring to the word “Marines” happen to be exactly the ones I want people to bring to the work we do.
After cleaning countless homes, I think the name has more than earned its place. Not because people think we’re run by Marines. Most people figure out pretty quickly that we’re not. But because the standard the name implies is one we’ve actually tried to live up to. We try to be precise in how we clean apartments, disciplined in how we train, and consistent in how we show up. If the name sets an expectation, good. We’d rather have people hold us to a high standard than no standard at all.
I still get the question regularly. At this point I kind of enjoy answering it, because the real answer is more interesting than the assumed one. People expect a veteran origin story. What they get instead is a guy who liked how a word sounded and then spent years trying to be worthy of it. I think that’s actually a better story.
If you’ve been curious about the name and you’re also curious about the work, you can book a cleaning here and see if the name matches the experience.
The short version is this. The name was catchy. It conveyed the right things. The people who had the most right to object didn’t. And we’ve spent every year since trying to make sure the name isn’t just catchy, but accurate.
