Women to know: Being owner of East Dallas Vintage is Chelsea Callahan-Haag’s favorite job ‘by a mile’

Two years ago, Chelsea Callahan-Haag was the No. 1 customer at her own store, East Dallas Vintage.

“I got this email from Square, and they were like, ‘Here’s all your data and your stats, and here’s your busiest day. And do you want to meet your top customer?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, I want to meet the top customer.’ I clicked on the button, and it was me, and I laughed so hard,” Callahan-Haag says. “So I have tried to not be the top customer, but it’s hard.”

Her career has taken twists and turns, but her current role could have been foretold from when she was a teenager growing up in Granbury in the early ’90s. She remembers visiting the former Dallas vintage store Ahab Bowen when she was young, one of the first that she had been to. She wore vintage clothes and hung out at her local thrift store — so much so that a woman who worked there bought her a present for Christmas.

“People would come to my house to try on my vintage clothes, and we would go somewhere weird, like the cemetery, and take pictures,” she says. “I guess I have always had a fascination with or interest in vintage or just like being different, being unique. Friends would come over in high school and wear my Levi’s bell bottoms or my polyester flower power shirt.”

Callahan-Haag has been following her passions throughout her life. She moved to Spain for a while with a man she was dating. She worked in the Dallas music scene at Good Records and booked bands at Double Wide. She helped open the restaurant and bar Thunderbird Station during the COVID-19 pandemic, and even though it closed, she’s still proud of it and misses it.

The only sore spot on her resume was her human resources corporate job that she had in the 2010s and quit before the pandemic — that was definitely not her vibe.

“I’ve always been a numbers person, so I always really liked numbers and bookkeeping and payroll and spreadsheets. It was up my alley. But I also am a people person, so it was a good mix of things for me. I am just not a corporate person,” she says. “I hope I never have to work at a corporate job ever again.”

Her vintage store is a passion project, too, and her favorite job so far “by a mile,” she says.

Unlike her corporate job, she can have the work-life balance she wants because she makes the schedule. She did admit that it was difficult for her to take time off work for oral surgery recovery this year, not because she didn’t trust her managers but because she missed her shop.

“It felt really weird to be sitting at home and not be here,” Callahan-Haag says. “I may have come back a little before I should have, may have paid for it a little bit, but it was hard to stay away. I like being here, and I feel like I should be here, but I don’t overwork. I don’t have to overwork. It did take a lot of work to get here, but I’m to a point where I can take some time off or not work every single weekend.”

She previously had antique booths at multiple places, including North Dallas Antique Mall, and would also participate in pop-up markets.

“My husband would joke, ‘How much more stuff do you have to have before you can just open a store?’” she says. “I had multiple storage units.”

Callahan-Haag opened East Dallas Vintage with Melissa Maher (who she has since bought out) in November 2021 at Gaston and Carroll Avenues near Domino’s Pizza. The shop moved to its current location in a 100-year-old building near Peak and Bryan Streets a year later.

“We knew pretty quickly that we were going to a need a bigger place,” Callahan-Haag says. “Everything here is better.”

In March 2023, the store’s footprint expanded as the second side was opened.

“I know we’re not as big as some of the other places, but I like the size because everybody can get through it in one visit,” she says.

East Dallas Vintage was a success from the beginning. Originally, the store was a kind of pop-up, renting the space at Gaston and Carroll for only a few months. Business went well, so it stayed open permanently.

And the name of the shop as well as the location was intentional.

“East Dallas is the best Dallas,” Callahan-Haag says.

East Dallas Vintage currently has about 77 vendors (and there’s a waitlist for more), with some starting small and growing into a whole booth. All the paid employees are vendors, so they are invested in the shop’s success, Callahan-Haag says. The front window display is decorated by two of the vendors in the store (Cycle Etc. Vintage and Harkensback) using items from other booths and has a theme each month — Tiki island, Sahara nights and Victorian Christmas, for example.

The store has received media attention, including an appearance in a Vogue listicle, and won the Greater East Dallas Chamber of Commerce’s Live Local Award last year. Even celebrities like Florence Welch of the band Florence + The Machine and Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson have crossed the shop’s threshold.

Callahan-Haag spoke kindly of both Welch and Davidson and was proud that she was able to make the latter laugh after she said, “I guess you don’t want to join our mailing list” at checkout. But the store owner emphasized prioritizing the shopping experience, even for celebrities without making a big fuss.

“I think it’s from working in the music industry, but I just don’t want to bombard someone,” Callahan-Haag says. “I want them to just be able to have a shopping experience without people asking for stuff from them.”

But she’s not surprised to see celebrities show up in vintage shops because they’re unique places. She even points customers, Davidson included, to other stores in the area as well as local bars and restaurants in the guide she gives to out-of-towners. She’s of a “rising tide lifts all boats” mindset in this way. Vintage, secondhand and thrift stores all have different items and vibes, and when people shop, they are usually going to multiple places, so it’s good for business to be around multiple shops and recommend them to customers.

“That’s not competition,” Callahan-Haag says. “It’s good. There’s enough for everybody.”

Similarly, she is proud that East Dallas Vintage is also a spot for community events and pop-ups in its backyard terrace. She doesn’t charge vendors to do this, seeing it as another mutually beneficial opportunity.

“I feel like it’s good for my business because more people come to my shop because they’re coming to their event,” she says. “You can’t own a small business and say that you’re part of the community if you’re not actively doing things for the community.”