I bought two pairs of leggings - but accidental subscription meant they cost me £5,000

'Two pairs of leggings ended up costing me £5,000' A woman who found she had spent thousands of pounds on a monthly subscription with a sportswear firm after having bought two pairs of leggings seven years earlier says she had "no idea" she had signed up to such a commitment. Clare Lane says she had "no idea" she signed up to a subscription when she bought the sportswear Clare Lane said she had bought the leggings from Fabletics, an online sportswear retailer, in 2017 and "as far as I was concerned, it was a one-off purchase and that was the end of it". "I wore the leggings, they were decent. I hadn't thought about it at all in that time," Ms Lane said. She told BBC Radio 4's You & Yours that she only realised she had also taken out a subscription when she and her husband were changing credit cards in October this year. Purchases on their existing card were being automatically paid off from their joint bank account, she explained. Ms Lane, from Leeds, said that when she went back to her credit card statements, she was horrified to find monthly payments of about £50 to Fabletics going back seven years - adding up to a total of almost £5,000. The company has since refunded most of Ms Lane's money, but its general manager for Europe told the BBC that customers must also take "a little bit of responsibility". Fabletics was set up in 2013 and co-founded by Hollywood actress and singer Kate Hudson. The company has also run high-profile collaborations with Lizzo and Khloe Kardashian. It claims to be an innovator in bringing subscriptions to fashion, and its latest UK accounts showed revenue of just under £20m in 2024. Fabletics runs a "VIP" subscription service which means that for a monthly fee of £59.99 its customers get store credit which can only be used to buy products from its website. The firm has told the BBC it tells customers four times during purchases that they are signing up for a subscription, adding that it is easy to cancel. However, several of its customers have told the BBC that was not made clear to them. Ms Lane also said the firm's emails had all filtered into her junk folder. She said that getting her money back from the firm after discovering she had been paying a monthly subscription had proved difficult. "It's been a whole series of emails and phone calls, a lot of correspondence and formal recorded delivery letters," she said. "We've tried to go through our credit card company to retrieve some of the money. We've gone to Trading Standards." 'Waiting for resolution' Other Fabletics customers told the BBC they had faced similar problems. Lowri De Gennaro, from Llangollen in Wales, said she had bought a pair of its leggings on a new credit card in March 2023. She explained it was only 30 months later that she discovered Fabletics had billed her £54.99 a month...

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