NEED TO KNOW
Months after a TikToker called out a local boutique, the small business owner is publicly revisiting the conflict that she claims she resolved.
In July, Ashley Owens made a video about a shopping experience at a store that doubled as a salon, where she claims she was met with negativity from an employee. Owens claimed she was posting the video because she felt like “the owner should probably know.”
Her review reached over 435,000 viewers, and among them was Jessica Zirkelbach, the founder of Belle Beauty and Anderson Salon + Boutique, who was quick to take accountability for what happened in her store.
“I’m the owner. Super upset this happened and already reached out to make it right,” Zirkelbach commented. “This is not our standard at all!”
One day later, on July 26, Owens posted an update confirming that the owner reached out to her. “She was very, very sweet, very apologetic, and really kind of heartbroken that it had happened, but she was glad that I made the video because she had no idea,” the influencer shared.
Just over five months later, Zirkelbach took to TikTok with more to say about the situation in a video that she’s since removed from her page. After recounting how she apologized to Owens and engaged in a dialogue with her, the boutique owner said she asked Owens “if she would give us another chance and if she kindly would remove the video.”
“She agreed to remove the video, but then the video gained traction overnight, and I’m talking hundreds of thousands of views and comments,” Zirkelbach alleged in her video posted on Monday, Jan. 5. “The next day, she did not reply to another one of my messages, and then later in the afternoon, she reached out and let me know that there must have been a glitch because she could not get the video to delete.”
Zirkelbach says she “came to terms” with the fact that the video’s comment section was “flooded” with similarly negative experiences at her store. “And I was OK with that, because had she not posted that video, I never would have learned that that was people’s experience over and over and over,” she explained.
She went on to explain how her team has spent the past months working on the aspects that were criticized by Owens and other TikTok users. “We just finished a renovation to separate the two spaces more clearly, and have worked on so much to better customers experiences,” Zirkelbach said, adding that she’s now disheartened to see that the original negative review video is pinned to the top of Owens’ profile.
In a statement to PEOPLE, Zirkelbach explains her position in the conflict. “The original video was posted six months ago and was highly impactful on me, my mental health, and my business. I took accountability for the experience and have spent the last six months making real changes and improvements,” she says.
The shop owner notes that Owens’ original video started recirculating recently after she shared another, unrelated video about a different boutique.
“Because the original video about Belle Beauty was pinned on her page, I started receiving notifications again of people liking my comment identifying myself as the owner,” Zirkelbach adds in her statement, noting that Owens’ follow-up video was not pinned at the time. (Owens has since pinned the second Belle Beauty video from July.)
Zirkelbach also claims she saw Owens comment — “People love small town boutique drama” — which struck a nerve. “This is not drama to me. This is my life, my business, and something I have poured endless time, money, and heart into,” the Southern store owner shares.
In her own statement to PEOPLE, Owens denies that her “small town boutique drama” comment referred to the Belle Beauty discourse. She claims she was referencing a different viral conflict in the area.
Owens also notes that her original video about Zirkelbach’s store wasn’t meant to be a review at all. She says she only intended to recap her negative experience at Belle Beauty to ask her followers if they thought she was “overreacting.”
“I never mentioned the name of the store on purpose, because I also own a business. I’m not trying to trash anybody or tarnish anybody. I was just talking about my experience at a certain store,” Owens says.
“Describing the layout of the store was not me [being] like, ‘Oh, just so y’all know where this is at.’ It really wasn’t like that,” she continues, adding that she was under the impression that there were other boutique-salons in the area. “I was just kind of like, ‘This is the situation that I was in because of the layout of the store.'”
Speaking to PEOPLE, Zirkelbach reiterates her claim that Owens previously agreed to remove her video before it started gaining viral attention. “After it blew up, she went back on that agreement and recently pinned the video. That choice continued to drive attention and content at the expense of my business,” says the South Carolina local.
Owens maintains that she pinned the Belle Beauty video in the interest of her own content, since it attracted a significant number of viewers. After Owens realized Zirkelbach misinterpreted her intentions, she decided to pin the follow-up video as well.
“I’ve started looking at other content creators who have a lot of traction on their page and things like that, and most of them have [pinned] what they’re known for and their most liked video. That’s what people recognize them from,” Owens tells PEOPLE. “To me, that’s just kind of what people are doing on TikTok right now. So I pinned the videos.”
She claims that the actual act of the pinning video “had very little effect” on the view count. Owens says Zirkelback’s response was what drove up the numbers again.
Regardless, Zirkelbach insists her since-removed post from earlier this month was not meant as an attack on Owens.
“It was me sharing my side of the experience and standing up for myself and for Belle Beauty,” the boutique owner tells PEOPLE. “There are several families who depend on this business for their income, and I take that responsibility very seriously. I stand firm in defending what I have built and in speaking truthfully about what happened.”
