Veronica Olivo considered opening a storefront, but she has decided that pop-ups like the Market on Cedar Springs in March — alongside eBay and Facebook Marketplace — are her best options.
CAROLINE SAVOIE | East Texas Reporter
carosavo@storydustsearch.com
Veronica Olivo has been collecting things her whole life: from vintage novels to discarded furniture to old records to stray ceiling fans abandoned at the curb. Over 48 years, spent mostly in East Dallas, Olivo said, she has also collected something harder to quantify: a sense of who her community is, who it has been and who it is becoming.
These days, Olivo channels much of her energy into Hoot n Hollar Thrift, a resale business she launched earlier this year to divert discarded goods from landfills into the hands of people who can use them at prices cheaper than you’ll find online.
“I genuinely want to save trash and give people a good deal,” Olivo said. “And I want to have fun doing it.”
The art of heap hoppin’
Long before Hoot n Hollar had a name, Olivo was doing what she calls “heap hoppin”: driving through neighborhoods on bulk trash pickup night, pulling up to curbside piles and eyeing what could be saved.
“I’ve been doing this since I was a kid,” she said, explaining that she has built a small ecosystem around the practice. She offers to help neighbors clean out garages and storage spaces, with one condition: Anything they plan to throw away is hers to take.
She hits garage sales and estate sales, negotiating cash for piles of goods that she later resells for a profit.
Furniture gets sanded and refinished with salvaged paint bought for 50 cents at garage sales. A ceiling fan left for bulk trash becomes someone else’s treasure.
The business runs primarily through Facebook Marketplace and eBay, supplemented by monthly in-person pop-up markets. Olivo had her first pop-up in March at Market on the Strip on Cedar Springs, then she appeared at Flea Harvey’s, a market at Lee Harvey’s bar and restaurant, 1807 Gould St. in Dallas, on May 16.
Her focus is primarily hard goods: furniture, decor, jewelry and records. She also offers custom sourcing for clients who come to her with a specific aesthetic and a budget.
Olivo said she is also a connector. If she can’t help someone, she sends them to Vagabond Vintage, Dolly Python or whoever else in Dallas might have what they need. Blankets and pillows she can’t sell go to animal shelters. Bulk bags of clothing, sorted by size, go to people who need them.
The name came naturally. Owls are her spirit animal, she said, and she has them tattooed on her body. So when someone suggested she name the venture, “Hoot n Hollar” announced itself before she could think of anything else.
“It kind of just made itself,” she said.
Buy from each other
Olivo’s pitch for resale goes beyond treasure hunting. It is, at its core, a theory of community survival.
She has watched overconsumption spiral: cheap goods ordered online, shipping costs that dwarf the purchase price, drivers who can’t afford gas, warehouses full of disposable products destined for landfills within years of manufacture.
“We’re broke,” she said flatly. “Let’s buy from each other.”
She envisions a near future in which barter and mutual aid become necessities rather than novelties, in which people know their neighbors again and ask each other for help.
And Olivo wants Hoot n Hollar to be part of that infrastructure — a network she can call on when someone needs something, a resource she can mobilize when her community needs something.
“I want to be able to call my people and be like, OK, guys, who has X, Y and Z?” she said.
Earlier this year, Olivo set aside plans for a physical storefront after weighing real estate costs and the risks of fixed overhead. She prefers a lean, mobile operation: pop-ups, yard sales at friends’ homes and an apartment full of carefully curated inventory.
“I would rather just go to people,” she said.
Her children are helping with social media. A TikTok live-selling experiment is on the horizon, once she figures out the platform. Her reviews on Facebook Marketplace are strong.
Roots on The Strip
The community-first philosophy that drives Hoot n Hollar is one Olivo has been building for decades, starting on Cedar Springs.
Olivo grew up in East Dallas and first wandered down the city’s historic LGBTQ+ corridor, known simply as “The Strip,” around age 15, when she was a student at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, known locally as Arts Magnet.
“When I went to high school at Arts Magnet, that’s when I ended up meeting a lot of queer folks who were kind of in the same position as me,” she said.
Those classmates led her to Crossroads Market, a beloved Cedar Springs institution that housed a coffee bar, a bookstore and a gathering place for the community. Olivo said she still owns lesbian novels she bought there decades ago, out-of-print titles she says she can’t find anywhere else.
From there, she found her chosen family at Union Jack, a clothing boutique on the Strip where her closest friends eventually went to work. Some of them, like Greg Casillo, remain fixtures of the neighborhood today. Casillo now tends bar at Round-Up Saloon and sits on the organizing committee of the bar’s annual Selena tribute party, an event Olivo says grew out of a group conversation she was part of years ago.
“The first year we did it, it blew up,” she said. “It was insane. And it’s only gotten bigger every year.”
For years, Olivo also photographed nightlife along The Strip, capturing names and faces at every bar she visited. She later hosted Sunday karaoke at Round-Up, and now she serves on the executive board of USKA Team Texas, a competitive karaoke organization.
She describes The Strip with the complicated tenderness of someone who has watched a neighborhood and herself change over decades: “It still feels like home, but it’s not exactly my place to hang anymore, if that makes sense,” she said.
Sobriety and healing
Alongside the community and the camaraderie Olivo found on The Strip came drinking: lots of it, and early. Olivo said she had her first drink at 13 years old in a red Solo cup passed around in a field. By the time she was of legal age, she was a regular on The Strip, where cheap drinks reigned.
“We felt safe on The Strip, that we could be ourselves,” she said. “Alcohol access was so easy, and it helped us function because of the pressures. But it became a crutch.”
After navigating her journey with alcoholism, Olivo quit drinking on July 24, 2023. Her three-year sobriety anniversary is this next month.
The decision, she said, came down to her children, a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old who began noticing her drinking. What she didn’t anticipate was how much the choice would reveal about herself.
“I didn’t realize I was actually doing it for myself,” she said. “How my life has improved, my mental health has improved, my outlook on everything has improved. I’m just happier not drinking.”
Sobriety, she said, has forced a reckoning that goes far beyond putting down a bottle.
“There’s just a ton of inner work you have to do as to why you’re drinking,” she said. “The biggest obstacle, the hardest, the most difficult thing, is to change the way that you think and to talk to yourself like someone you love.”
She describes an ongoing internal practice: catching negative or intrusive thoughts, interrupting them and redirecting. When the urge to drink creeps in after a hard day, she goes outside to water her plants, takes a walk or sits in the sun for five minutes.
“It’s harder than not drinking,” she said. “It’s easier for me to turn down a shot than it is to change my pattern of thinking.”
Olivo is open about the difficulties she still faces. She continues therapy, is navigating co-parenting as a divorced mother and is taking a step back from a long-term relationship while she tends to her own nervous system. But she credits sobriety with sharpening the focus that Hoot n Hollar now runs on, and with bringing her closer to the kids who help her run it.
For someone who spent years building other people’s wardrobes, then watched a business evaporate when a major client company closed without warning, and who then spent years more just living, grieving, parenting and getting sober, starting something new at 48 feels less like a risk and more a return to herself.
“Life is really coming full circle,” she said.
Hoot n Hollar Thrift can be found on social media at @hootnhollarthrift.