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.
Staff pick
After years of not having a solid shoe-storage system, my partner and I invested in these bins, which can hold over 40 pairs of our shoes.
The Antbox Foldable Shoe Rack was so easy to assemble that I was suspicious I had missed a step. The entire structure comes in one piece (save for the doors), packed flat like an accordion. You pull it up to expand the vertical support pieces until they click satisfyingly into place. It’s held together by interlocking joints, so there’s no fiddling with tiny screws or Allen keys. Then the doors snap onto the hinges — and that’s it.
The whole assembly took about 20 minutes, and this rack was so much easier to put together than its 134-piece predecessor.
The rack is sold in four different sizes. I got the largest size, which measures 65 by 21 by 13 inches (HWD), so it’s almost as tall as I am, at 5-foot-7. The smallest size is more petite, measuring 26 by 21 by 13 (HWD). The rack has 10 levels, and the company says it can accommodate 20 pairs of shoes (one pair per individual cubby). But I’ve found that it can hold a lot more, depending on the type of shoes you’re stowing.
For example, ballet flats, Birkenstocks, and low-profile sneakers (like Adidas Sambas) can be stacked and (gently) smushed together into one cubby, to leave spots for chunkier shoes that need more space, like boots and heels. Jeffery and I can fit over 40 pairs of shoes in this shoe rack, with some extra space left over for scarves, sneaker-cleaning supplies, and even dust bags.
The rack is positioned along what would otherwise be an empty sidewall in our closet. We split the storage in half, with the right side of the rack dedicated to Jeffery’s shoes and the left side to mine.
The amber-tinted translucent doors are cleverly designed. They allow you to slightly mute visual proof of the chaos inside, but they don’t totally hide the contents. That means I rarely forget about a pair of shoes I own, and I’m not stressed every time I walk into my closet. The translucent doors also come in clear, though they might provide too much visual clarity on what’s inside.
My one beef with the doors: the prominent Antbox branding on the center of each door. It slightly obscures my view, and it generally feels a little obnoxiously out of place, given the rack’s otherwise sleek design.
Each door has a hole to hook your finger through to pull it open. The doors swing from hinges on the sides of the unit, and they stay closed with magnets. In the past year, we haven’t had any instances of shoes toppling out onto the floor, which is much more than I can say for the shoddy old rack that had completely open shelving.
But — and this is a big but — this shoe rack is a pretty big hunk of plastic.
I agonized over whether or not I wanted to recommend it due to its significant plastic footprint. But after the Wirecutter social media team posted an organizational tour of my apartment, I got so many texts and DMs asking for the link to my shoe rack that it seemed it offered a solution that many other people needed too.
I had also considered buying a wooden shoe rack, but they were prohibitively expensive and made from less-than materials (like melamine-covered particle board), and many of them still included plastic pieces. I also searched in thrift stores and at estate sales (my favorite places to shop), but I didn’t have any luck finding a solution that would fit properly into our closet.
I even considered building my own shoe rack, but again, when I priced the necessary supplies, the end result would have been quite expensive. And since we’re renters, it didn’t make a lot of sense to build a custom storage solution that wouldn’t necessarily be applicable (or easy to move) to a future home.
Even though this storage system is pricey compared with some other, more-traditional shoe racks (the large version I own is $220), it still costs less than the DIY version I considered. Plus, I was ready to invest in something to really solve a problem that had been plaguing me for some time. And it’s been a major improvement in our quality of life!
So, yes, this rack isn’t made from an ideal material, and it’s pricier than some other popular models. However, it has significantly reduced the angst I feel every time I walk into my closet—and indeed, I can actually walk into it now that the piles of shoes aren’t covering the floor.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Ben Frumin.
