Richard J. Daley Center, Chicago
CHICAGO — Los Angeles-based activewear maker Fabletics has been hit with a class action lawsuit demanding the company pay its customers back for charges the company included to pay tariffs that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled were illegally imposed by President Donald Trump.
On March 6, attorneys with the Law Offices of Todd M. Friedman, of Skokie and Calabasas, California, filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against Fabletics LLC.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of named plaintiff Norah Flaherty, identified as a resident of Chicago.
However, the plaintiffs seek to expand the action to include likely "thousands" of other people in the U.S. and Illinois who allegedly overpaid for products purchased through Fabletics in recent months.
The lawsuit accuses Fabletics of allegedly wrongly making its online customers pay more for their items to offset the costs imposed on the clothing maker from tariffs imposed on Fabletics products imported into the U.S.
According to its website and court documents, Fabletics is based near Los Angeles and designs its clothing there. However, the company purportedly relies on factories in Asia, and particularly in the countries of China, Vietnam and Thailand, to manufacture its lines of products, including women's and men's activewear and health care scrubs, among others.
Fabletics sells those products to customers online and in physical storefront locations. In the Chicago area, the company operates retail stores in the of Oak Brook, Schaumburg and Skokie.
According to the complaint, plaintiffs allege the company, like many retailers and other sellers, increased their prices in 2025, soon after President Trump announced the imposition of certain tariffs on goods imported from many countries, and particularly from China.
Some retailers and others later challenged those tariffs in court, accusing the president of illegally imposing what are essentially taxes on imported goods by asserting improper authority under the International Emergency Economics Powers Act.
The U.S. Supreme Court in February ruled Trump had, indeed, exceeded his powers under that law and declared the associated tariffs illegal.
They have been followed by class actions and other lawsuits on behalf of consumers, who assert the companies should not now be allowed to enjoy a "windfall" by keeping the tariffs they paid to the government using funds they extracted from consumers in the name of paying the tariffs.
Such assertions also form the basis of the new complaint filed against Fabletics.
An IEEPA tariff windfall that could be kept by Fabletics "offends public policy, is oppressive and causes substantial injury to consumers by depriving those consumers ... of the cost of the unlawful IEEPA Tariffs," the plaintiffs assert in their lawsuit.
But the lawsuit asserts that Fabletics still owes its customers, whether or not it actually receives any tariff refund, because, they say, the company should never have charged customers "the cost of unconstitutional, unlawful IEEPA tariffs."
The lawsuit does not estimate how much total the company should owe.
However, according to customer reports online, the company had added tariff surcharges of up to $6 per order.
The complaint asserts Flaherty specifically paid $14.58 over three transactions to cover the cost of tariffs.
The complaint, however, seeks unspecified payouts on behalf of all Fabletics customers in the U.S. and Illinois in the past three years.
Fabletics has not yet responded to the complaint in court.
