These $12 pant hangers save me a ton of space in my tiny closet

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Connie Chen/Business Insider

I don’t have a lot of space in my closet for folded clothes, especially not bulky jeans and pants.
To make better use of my limited closet space, I got two Whitmor Swing Arm Slack Hangers ($11.99).
Each steel hanger has four arms coated in vinyl. The arms swing out so you can easily place and remove your pants.
In the year that I’ve owned these hangers, they’ve streamlined the way I store my pants and freed up space for my other clothes.

Living in a cozy and quaint apartment in Brooklyn (that’s real estate agent-speak for "shockingly small"), I feel like I spend every other weekend reorganizing my room and trying to figure out how to make more efficient use of my space.

My joke of a closet is a constant source of pain for me, particularly because I have many pairs of bulky pants and nowhere to put them. I’m used to folding my pants, but over time I realized the folded stacks were taking up too much space. With the design of my room and closet, it makes more sense to hang clothes instead of fold and stack them.

I took to Amazon to find affordable and effective solutions to my pant predicament and landed on the Whitmor Swing Arm Slack Hanger ($11.99), which had more than 500 five-star reviews. A mere $12 to end the recurring misery of picking up toppled-over stacks of jeans? I’ll take two.

Amazon

I decided to designate a group of jeans and casual pants to these two hangers. Each chrome steel hanger measures 16" x 17.5" and has four arms that swing out to allow you to put on and take out your pants. The arms are coated in vinyl to prevent your pants from slipping off.

According to the product description, each arm (plus the bottom rod of the hanger) is meant for one pair of pants — five pairs total per hanger. But always one to test the limits and challenge the status quo, I ultimately squeezed eight to nine pairs per hanger.

Here’s what 17 pairs of pants look like on the Whitmor hangers:

Connie Chen/Business Insider

The main drawback of putting this many pairs of pants, especially jeans, on one hanger is that it can get heavy, but I personally don’t mind the weight since it’s allowed me to take advantage of the vertical hanging space in my closet. I’ve had these hangers for almost a year and they’ve held up reliably well the entire time.

When I want to wear a pair of pants, I take the hanger off the rod, lay it on my bed, and swing out the appropriate arm. If I’m lazy, I just yank a pair out while it’s still hanging in my closet. Either way, I can quickly identify and pull out the pants I want with minimal disturbance to the other pants or the rest of my closet.

The other nice thing about these hangers is they allow you to easily organize pants by function, color, or any other category you’d like. It’s more mentally efficient, but also visually satisfying to have your clothes organized this way. Though their name says they’re for pants, you can also use them in other creative ways, like to hang scarves or craft supplies.

If your pants often end up in mountainous piles or take up too much space folded up, use the Whitmor Slack Hanger to streamline the clutter. This durable and effective way to tidy up my pants has made me less stressed about the state of my closet, and it only costs $12.

Get the Whitmor Swing Arm Slack Hanger for $11.99 at Amazon here

Shop all closet organization solutions from Whitmor at Amazon here