A petty customer dispute spiraled out of control on TikTok after a woman got sent skeleton pictures instead of a gown

• TikTok erupted over SkeletonGate — a dispute between a small seller and a customer.
• Desire Westphal was sent posters of skeletons instead of a birthing gown — and loudly called the company out.

As an online seller with her own business, Caitlyn Schollmeier is used to packages going missing, or getting damaged in transit.

But when a customer received two posters of skeletons instead of the birth gown she'd ordered from Schollmeier's maternity brand, she was baffled.

"It was really weird," Schollmeier told Insider. "We don't sell anything like that."

She said at first she wondered if it was a prank or a joke, "because it just didn't really make any sense."

The strange parcel mix-up resulted in a back and forth with Schollmeier and her customer, Desire Westphal, on TikTok, which became a viral spectacle attracting millions of views.

It took on a life of its own — and became knowns as SkeletonGate — as people shared their own theories and took sides in the dispute.

Westphal posted the first TikTok showing herself opening the parcel on September 12, asking her viewers: "Did I just get scammed?"

In the video, she tears open the suspiciously small package to find two tubes. Both of them contained A4-sized, black and white posters of skeletons.

"I'm very confused right now," Westphal said, showing the camera the label which seemed to match Schollmeier's company, Lila.

"I'm really confused why they sent me pictures of skeletons."

Schollmeier said she became aware of Westphal's strange situation through people tagging her on the video.

Schollmeier is training to be a midwife and mostly posts childbirth and maternity content on her page.

"I've just built this beautiful community of people who just want to learn about childbirth," she said. "So it was very much a very rude awakening to be all of a sudden getting all these hate comments, not knowing where they're coming from."

She told Insider her team then tried contacting Westphal to sort it out, calling four times in total.

The operations manager eventually spoke with Westphal, Schollmeier said, and agreed to send a new gown for free, plus a swaddle.

"That seemed to be a good resolution to him," Schollmeier said of her colleague.

Schollmeier thought this was the end of it, but then Westphal posted another video on September 13. She said the brand gave her "sketchy vibes" and accused them of "blowing up" her phone trying to contact her.

Westphal said she would have preferred the company emailed her, but "they kept calling" with multiple different phone numbers. She also said the operations manager who called was "rude and unprofessional" when he questioned why she had posted a TikTok about the order.

"The attitude is crazy and so uncalled for because you're the one that messed up, not me," she said. Westphal didn't respond to Insider's attempts to contact her.

In the video criticizing Lila, she said she wouldn't recommend the company to her 700,000 followers.

Schollmeier said she found this response surprising and "not entirely honest" because Westphal posted the second TikTok after she agreed to resolve the dispute by taking the second delivery.

"It's like, well, you are getting hundreds of thousands of views on this video that's pretty damaging," she said. "Tagging my personal page, sending a lot of pain over here, yeah, we're probably going to want to call you."

Schollmeier decided to respond with her own TikToks, which she now admits were "a little emotional" because she felt "backed into a corner".

"I think it was just because it was something that had kind of blindsided me a little bit, and I was frustrated," she said.

Schollmeier started Lila Maternity two days before her twin boys were born. She had made a gown to wear during labor, and was getting inundated with requests from other moms who wanted one too.

"It's taken a lot of time and energy to make it into what it is today," she said. She described living in a trailer, packing gowns in shifts with her husband while they juggled caring for the baby boys.

In Schollmeier's video, she floated two separate theories for what happened — though without evidence for either.

She suggested Westphal may have switched the packages herself to make content for TikTok. She also said she had doubts about a person on her own team.

She said she later regretted jumping to that conclusion, and took her videos down. But her response had already upset Westphal who made several more TikToks, including one where she showed the doorbell camera footage of her package being delivered.

"So instead of just taking accountability that your new hire potentially could have done this, you're going to call a customer a scammer," Westphal said. "It sounds so silly, that doesn't make sense."

Schollmeier said she didn't watch any more of Westphal's videos because she wanted to distance herself from it after that, but hoped the second pacakge would end the matter.

"I didn't appreciate the way that she handled it. I'm sure she didn't appreciate the way that we handled it," she said. "I do think that there's definitely a higher standard for how a company or a business owner should respond, and I didn't meet that mark."

She added she thinks Westphal could have handled the situation differently too, and it "didn't have to turn into the issue it did."

Westphal also included Schollmeier's phone number in one of the TikToks, she said, which led to harassment.

"It was just really terrible," Schollmeier said. "It's just all so malicious and just so unnecessary."

Schollmeier said she's seen TikTok justice in action, and appreciates its power when it comes to, say, an airline unfairly booting a customer off a plane, or someone getting called out for harmful behavior.

"But this was a situation that just wasn't that at all," she said. "Because by the time that I even posted my very first video, it was already fixed. She had already gotten what she wanted, and it was within probably two hours of when she sent us an email."

The comments on Westphal and Schollmeier's videos were full of people adding fuel to the disagreement, taking sides, and calling both women unprofessional.

Schollmeier said that it wasn't all bad though.

"Surprisingly, even with all of it, I did actually gain followers," she said. "And we had a little uptick in sales, weirdly enough."

But her conclusion was that it would have been better not to post at all, settling the dispute in private then waiting for it to pass.

"Maybe people didn't follow the whole thing or they didn't understand both sides. That's fine. They don't have to," she said. "I'm just going to let it blow over."