Inside Pegasus Creative Reuse. Photo courtesy of Dorothy Villarreal.
Pegasus Creative Reuse is bringing a unique kind of ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ to Oak Cliff. This Friday, the art supply thrift store is opening its doors at Tyler Station and offering affordable, donated craft supplies to the community.
Couple and co-owners Dorothy Villarreal and Ernesto Diaz believe in the importance of sustainability and noticed the Oak Cliff community could benefit from a local, affordable art supply retail store.
“We have a really deep love for the community and wanted to do our bit to help promote sustainability here,” Villarreal said. “Once we kind of set our minds to it, all of the dominoes fell into place really quickly, and we’re really excited to just make this a hub in Dallas.”
During the pandemic, she said she and Diaz were both missing a sense of community and wanted a place where their friends could come hang out and create things that would also help make the world a better place.
“I have always been a lover of the arts, and I consider myself a collector of hobbies so I’m always finding something new to do, create and mess up on,” Villarreal said.
Villarreal, originally from South Texas and has lived in the Cedar Crest area for the past three years, said her and her partner’s families have always been incredibly scrappy.
“The concept of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is not foreign to us. I grew up thinking that I was getting butter from the store, but it was actually just beans in the butter container,” she said.
When she attended Harvard University, she learned about the impact that consumerism was having on so many communities. She got involved there by implementing a ‘reuse station’ in her dorm.
In graduate school, she went on to learn about physical, creative reuse centers around the country.
“[These centers] were founded by people who hate seeing things that are perfectly useful and can be turned into creative things- so they found resources to divert waste from the landfill,” Villarreal said. “I think that’s what motivated us to do this.”
Villarreal said art has been proven to have many benefits to one’s mental health, ability to cope with difficult emotions, longevity in those with dementia and more.
“Art is such a powerful thing,” she added. “The things that your synapses will do when you’re creating things is really amazing, and it’s really a shame to see a divestment from the arts in public spaces and in lower income communities.”
Diaz said Oak Cliff is “an arts supply desert, and we wanted to be able to bring this to the community so that way you wouldn’t have to worry about going far for a major retailer, especially when it’s not available easily through public transit.”
Tyler Station’s nearby Dart train station makes the store accessible for all ages. Close-friend Claudia Vega, owner of local bookstore Whose Books, introduced the couple to the spot.
“We want there to be an aspect where you don’t feel you have to come to spend money- you can come to just hang out, make friends, work on a project- everyone’s welcome and it’s a third space in their life that’s not home or work,” Diaz said.
Diaz attended Louisiana Tech University, majoring in sustainable supply chain management with a concentration in history and in English.
The store is entirely self-funded by Villarreal and Diaz’s nine-to-five jobs in programmatic advertising and product operations, respectively, as well as family support.
“[The store has] everything that you could find at Michaels or Hobby Lobby, but cooler and better because there’s a story behind each item and because all of our things are donated, we’re able to offer them at an affordable price point,” Villarreal said.
Prices go as low as a penny in Pegasus, Diaz said. “Even though these art and craft items may just look like that on the surface level, those items have history. And so by passing along these items that I just go into a landfill, it continues to accumulate that history and take on something else on its own,” he added.
In the future, the store hopes to offer rental services such as a die cut machine, a Cricut, and a 3d printer because they know the exorbitant cost of acquiring those on your own.
“Leave the glitter with us, leave the mess with us and take something fun back home with you,” Diaz said.
Photo courtesy of Dorothy Villarreal.
Photo courtesy of Dorothy Villarreal.
The pair hope to inspire a new desire to play around and do things “with your hands that maybe you didn’t think you could do before,” Villarreal said.
The store wouldn’t have been possible without the partner-effort.
“When I see the way Dorothy lights up when she arrives at the store, anyone can tell she really cares deeply about these arts and that she cares deeply about the community,” Diaz said. “If everyone could look like Dorothy does when she’s working on her projects, the world would be a better place, and I want to support her in this vision.”
The couple said they are in this for the long run, and are in it to give back to the kid who has a dream of having access to arts.
“We want to provide it because we didn’t necessarily have that accessibility growing up,” Diaz said. “We’re like Andy and his toys in Toy Story because we take care of everything donated because we know how important each piece to this puzzle is.”
The store opens this Friday at 4 p.m on 1300 S Polk St.
