Chris Lewellyn Won’t Give Up on Deep Ellum. His Latest Venture Proves It.

There was a time, a few months ago, when Chris Lewellyn thought he might lose his store. Everything Ellum, an apparel store for local artists and brands, had found success after opening on Deep Ellum’s Main Street in late 2021, but roughly two years later, it was at a breaking point. The revenue from Lewellyn’s Print Shop on Elm Street is currently being used to pay for everything on sale in Everything Ellum, which means when one of the businesses struggles, so does the other. 

“I was in a really heavy spot where I had these loans that were kind of just eating me alive,” he says. “It was probably three weeks before I ran out of money.”

The longtime Dallas entrepreneur says he was sleeping, at best, three or four hours a night. The gnawing stress was taking a toll on his marriage, too, ultimately leading him and his wife to start couples counseling. He furloughed some staff, and had it not been for his landlord’s flexibility and an inheritance from a friend who passed away, Everything Ellum may have shuttered its doors. 

It's an example of the razor-thin margins most small businesses must cope with in their first few years. Lewellyn’s latest venture has several other strikes against it:

Its target audience is a bit trickier to nail down: “Most people have two to three styles of customers,” Lewellyn says. “We have 12 to 15.” And its fortune is determined, in part, by the general sentiment toward Deep Ellum at any given time. 

Incidents like a shooting last March on Elm Street that killed two people caused a decrease in foot traffic, which can be disastrous for a business like Everything Ellum. Among many potential customers — especially those from the suburbs — there’s a persistent assumption that Deep Ellum is dangerous, and the police department’s ongoing efforts to control crime in the area make parking and transportation particularly challenging. DPD closes Elm Street on weekends, and a business owner on Elm recently told the Observer the closure costs him “thousands” each week. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, businesses like the restaurant Thunderbird Station have recently closed after being around for only a few years. 

While he may have escaped from one of the roughest times in his business career, Lewellyn is still balancing all of these competing pressures and stressors while running the store, leading his print shop and working with his staff to come up with ways to boost both businesses.

“We had a 40%-off sale that went really well recently and got people down to the store,” Lewellyn says. He is quick to point out it wasn’t his idea; it was one of “the kids”: his employees. “I’m always open to the kids having a say and trying stuff.”

Everything Ellum is somewhat of a spiritual successor to Deep Ellum Trading Company, another Lewellyn-led business that worked with artists to develop and sell apparel, prints, stickers and other merch. In 2021, a trio of fellow entrepreneurs came to Lewellyn with the idea for a boardwalk-style shop where visitors could pop in and buy a shirt while they were browsing the neighborhood. The four local business owners started talking, and the idea morphed into the store you now see on Main Street. 

Lewellyn describes his approach like this: “Let's take artists and develop brands with them, then also take local brands from around North Texas and give them an outlet, all under the look of a shoewear store or a Vans. I wanted to smash all of that together and make a store in an artsier way.”

Ignoring the Skeptics

Some people were skeptical of the idea, mostly because of its location.

“During the planning process, some of the negative feedback we got was, ‘How are you going to create a brand around Deep Ellum?’” says Jess Stewart. “Some people have a negative view of the neighborhood because of the news, and then you have the fact that it’s pretty eclectic.”

Stewart once worked at the store and played an instrumental role in opening it. “It was a challenge, trying to get people to see it the way we saw it,” he says.

The reason Lewellyn says the store has “12 to 15” types of customer is because of the variety of artists and bands who partner with Everything Ellum. Twenty-five brands currently have products for sale in the store, and Lewellyn’s Print Shop prints all but eight of these brand’s products. Further, visitors can buy hats designed by cartoonist Gino Dal Cin, shirts illustrated by musician and artist Hunter Moehring, and candles, lighters and tees designed by Kaia Bellanca. And that’s just scratching the surface. 
In total, artists’ merch accounts for roughly 70 percent of the store’s profits — one reason Lewellyn says, “Everything Ellum is not my store; it’s the community’s store.

“We cater to everyone from streetwear kids to international tourists,” Lewellyn says. “That's a big challenge, to try to see what works and also honor the customers who come in the store and want to be a part of it and hopefully find their new favorite artist. That's what the goal is: Can you really turn someone on to something new, and then they fall in love?”

Like Lewellyn, Bellanca is a Deep Ellum mainstay who has worked at the closed bar LaGrange as well as Three Links. Now she works at Everything Ellum.

“You’ve seen a couple shops try to do this,” she says of the store’s strategy, “but it didn’t quite hit.” 

Asked how Everything Ellum can survive in an increasingly difficult environment for small businesses, Bellanca says there is no clear blueprint. 

“At the end of the day, you just don’t know what’s going to work. I’d like to keep reminding people that this neighborhood is about the art and the music, and let’s not let that get lost in the shiny things. We’ve got to keep it in people’s faces: It’s still about the art and the music. We’ll keep shifting goals and strategies as we go along.”

She adds that her new boss and the team he has assembled are “trying to keep the soul here,” and while she hates when people describe jobs as families, there is a familial element to the Lewellyn’s crew. 

With a soft voice that’s at odds with his long, tangled, metal band beard, Lewellyn is immediately disarming and instantly likable. When it comes to staff development, he takes a similar approach to his store’s work with artists and brands: He wants to give people a shot, then work it out along the way. 

Stewart, a tattoo artist and the store’s original manager, helped create and run Everything Ellum even though she had no prior experience doing anything like that. 

“Four months into working at Chris’ print shop, he told me he was going to open a store and he wanted me to run it,” she says. 

Her response was, “I have no idea how to do that, but I guess.”

Over the next six months, she learned the intricacies of merchandising. 

“You have to make things visually appealing, but they can’t be too perfect, because then someone might not want to pick it up.” 

During this time, she says she gained more confidence than she ever had and met some “local heroes” in the process, including Moehring and artist T.C. Oliver. When it came time to move on for a job at a tattoo shop, Stewart says it was an excruciating decision. 

“I’ve never been so involved and so a part of something. I was meeting people, and it was a huge networking system for me,” Stewart says. 

It got her a job designing a postcard for the The Kimpton Pittman Hotel, which is the perfect example of what Everything Ellum is all about. 

“We want to be a springboard and a physical space where emerging artists can sell their work,” explains Rose Bellamy-Hicks, Stewart’s successor as manager. 

In other words, the store wants to prove you can curate a local community and be profitable at the same time. If anyone can do that, it’s probably Lewellyn, who embodies resilience in the face of chaos. 

He survived a random shooting at a gas station on Ferguson Road and Interstate 635, and he has battled mental health struggles for much of his life. By his own admission, he works too much, which is necessary for the business but taxing on his personal life. 

“I’m optimistic, so I don’t want to say I’m not enjoying it,” he says. “But when you have tunnel vision like this, it gets very lonely.”

He still thinks about the great times he had in Deep Ellum when he was as young as 16, walking around and sneaking into concerts. That’s the reason he loves this neighborhood, he says — it’s given him decades of good memories. 

Now he hopes more people like him come to the store, bring their families and talk about where they used to hang out and go to shows. 

“When we talk in a year, I think things will be going even better,” he says. “We want to open up an art gallery, and we may try to hedge our bets and not do it in Deep Ellum. But I want to do it here. I love this area. I want to be here forever.”