About Tray & Threshold

What this site is

Tray & Threshold covers three things exhaustively: entryway storage benches, shoe storage cabinets, and hall trees. Not four. The site was set up around the idea that a small category covered properly beats a large one covered thinly, and the thing we cover properly is dimensions.

That focus comes from watching how people actually shop this category. They do not start by wondering which bench is best. They start with a tape measure and a gap in a hallway, and only then ask what fills it. Nearly every page here is built to be read in that order.

Who writes it

Scooter M. writes Tray & Threshold. The honest description is enthusiast: someone genuinely interested in how this stuff is made and measured, who reads the manuals, compiles the published specifications and does the arithmetic. No lab coat, and no claim to one.

There is deliberately no line here about years of experience, no credential, and no implied staff. Those are the easiest claims in the world to make and the easiest to disbelieve, and this category is full of them — one competitor's author bio describes a long-time gamer and tech enthusiast who apparently spent three months testing hall trees.

What we do instead

Four things, all of which a reader can check without owning anything.

1. Compile the manufacturer's published specification for every product, and name the source under each one.
2. Convert every dimension to both inches and centimeters, because half the depth questions in this category are asked in centimeters.
3. Check stated capacities against real shoe lengths from the standard sizing charts, rather than taking a pair count at face value.
4. Rank against a five-metric rubric with fixed weights, published in full, with the overall score computed from the metrics rather than typed in.

Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure — internal compartment depth, most often, or a weight limit on a piece sold as a bench — the page says so in as many words. That is more useful to somebody holding a tape measure than a confident estimate would be, and it is the reason how completely a maker documents its own product is one of the five things we score.

How the site is funded

Amazon Associates. If you buy something after following a link here we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We do not set prices, do not hold stock, and no commission has ever moved a product up a ranking — the order comes out of the rubric.

We are not currently in any other retailer's affiliate program. Where a product is worth knowing about and we cannot earn from it, it appears anyway and is labeled as earning us nothing. The IKEA cabinets on our narrow-cabinet page are the clearest example: they set the depths this category is measured against, so leaving them out would make the page worse.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, we want to know, and a correction with a source will be acted on rather than filed. Write to info@trayandthreshold.com. Every dimension on this site is checkable, which means every error is too.