The Closet Organizer I Get Asked About Most Often Is One I Resisted for Years

A close up image of shoes on a shelving unit inside an illustrative brown and purple frame.

When my partner, Jeffery, and I moved into our apartment a few years ago, we were thrilled that our bedroom had a walk-in closet. It felt like an aspirational episode of House Hunters.

But soon enough, our dream closet turned into an overcrowded dumping zone. Where else could I toss clothing-rental bags (shoutout to Nuuly), tote bags stuffed full of other tote bags, a hulking air mattress, items I swear I’m going to return, and the robot vacuum I want to hide when guests come over?

Now, there’s only so much storage space in our 750-square-foot apartment. So it makes sense that the walk-in closet became our go-to spot to store all kinds of stuff. But it got so crowded that we couldn’t actually, you know, walk into it anymore.

But the worst part? It was our crowded closet’s lack of shoe storage.

Jeffery and I love shoes. He’s obsessed with limited-edition sneaker drops, and I’m constantly browsing second-hand sites for shoe deals. Together, we have about 50 pairs of shoes. And neither of us is willing to downsize our collection. So as we crammed more and more things into our closet, there was less and less room for our shoes. For a year we just tossed our beloved shoes into a pile on the closet floor. It wasn’t pretty.

Our first real attempt at a shoe-storage solution came in the form of a cheap, unsightly shoe rack, with flimsy fabric shelves and wobbly aluminum pipes connected with plastic sockets. After just a year, this gimcrack rack was buckling and sagging under the weight of an ever-growing assortment of shoes.

We needed a better solution.

After a weeks-long hunt, I ordered these sturdy bins with translucent doors, and my closet has been decidedly less hellish since.



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