Sonoma's Closet
Nonprofit Platform • Site + Ops • Live • 2026
The public face and the working back office of a Sonoma County clothing closet: free clothes for individuals and families starting over, given by neighbors, organized behind one login.
The organization
Sonoma's Closet is Naomi Fritzinger's community project: gathered clothing goes straight to individuals and families rebuilding their lives, and anyone who needs something can take it, free, without paperwork. It ran out of a garage while the nonprofit formed around it, so the site had to say exactly where the project stood on any given day. Since September 10, 2026 it has been a California nonprofit corporation, and the site says that too.
The challenge
The site had two jobs that pull against each other: look like a place worth trusting with a carload of clothes, and stay truthful about a project that is one founder and a garage. It also needed working intake from day one, because offers of clothing, time, and space were arriving by text and getting lost.
My approach
Honesty as the design brief
A dotted badge at the top of every page states where the project stands, and it changes with the facts: it read in formation through the summer and carried the corporation's filing date the day the Welcome Letter arrived. The vision page lays out the plan in Naomi's own words, including what does not exist yet: the charity registration, the tax status, the barrier fund.
Public front, gated back office
The public pages are static, with no database in the request path. Everything operational sits behind a login at /hq: the interest inbox, the team, the month's needs list, pop-up events with a generated task list, a documents shelf, and a formation checklist that walks the filings in order with one next step on the home screen.
A form that defends itself
The get-involved form writes to Postgres through a server action holding the service key; the browser cannot insert anything directly. A honeypot and a rate limit sit in front, so a bot burst cannot flood the inbox.
One platform, swappable identity
The organization's name, email, and domain live in configuration, and the design system is scoped under its own wrapper. The same codebase can dress as the next community organization without a rebuild.
Inside the build
What we built
- A four-color mark drawn for the project: gold hanger and sun, brown road, teal tree and dove
- A needed-most list on What's needed that changes with the season
- Offers of clothes, time, and space land in an /hq inbox Naomi can act on
- Sign-in by an emailed six-digit code, no password to remember
- A formation checklist in HQ: six stages, numbered steps, and the fee, deadline and source for each
- Event flyers served from the site itself, so the founder prints them from her phone
- Mail on the domain through Google Workspace, with SPF and DMARC set
- robots.txt and a sitemap that expose the public pages and keep the private ones out
- Warm cream, turquoise, and burnt sienna over Bricolage Grotesque and Inter
The outcome
The site is live at sonomascloset.org, and on September 10, 2026 the project it describes became a California nonprofit corporation, with HQ carrying the filing checklist the whole way. A donor can see what is needed this month before loading the car, and every offer of help lands somewhere it can be answered. When the closet grows into the real space the vision page describes, the platform underneath is already shaped for it.