Annual Vacation Information

Hello Loyal 5X Customers! 

First we want to thank you for helping us achieve a record breaking first half of the year! We were able to continue operating and shipping orders through the Covid pandemic as we're a self-contained family run business. My wife Brittany operates nearly 100% of the business operations while I support with maintaining our catalog of parts offerings, developing new parts, technical support, social media, and website maintenance. With only two of us, we sometimes struggle to keep up, but we also didn't have to worry about social distancing in public, as our warehouse is right behind our house! We're essentially on our own little "island" here in St Cloud Florida, and as long as our local USPS route picks up our packages and we continued to get our stocking orders delivered, we didn't even have to leave the house. Being small and family run offered us the benefit of continued operation while honoring quarantine orders and stay-at-home guidelines, and we were able to support the record breaking amount of orders you placed with us, so THANK YOU! We are VERY appreciative! 

Now for a little industry insight. The Covid pandemic gave the automotive retail industry a one-two punch in the following ways:

  1. Overseas factories where many parts and materials are sourced from shut down earlier this year, which dried up supply lines to many of our manufacturers and warehouse distributors. It also hindered material supply to US based manufacturers, which caused a shortage of the materials needed to manufacture parts if they were U.S. made. While ALL of our 5X Racing branded products are U.S. made and produced, some of the materials needed to manufacture our products might have been caught up in this shortage, or our machine shops working in reduced capacities due to the shut down. Things such as bronze for our shifter bushings and plastics for our door bushings have been delayed in getting to our machinists, which of course delays the finished products arriving to us, and getting out to you. A MAJOR trickle down effect happened for parts supply, both for large companies (Eibach, Bilstein, Gates, etc...) and small (us and our machine shop partners who manufacture our parts). With our focus being on offering handy kits for your Miata, if one piece of our kits are out of stock, the whole kit is now unavailable. This happened to us with a lot of our kits, as Eibach springs and sway bars, Gates water pumps, and Bilstein shocks to name a few have been on prolonged backorder for quite some time. If we can't get them, we can't resell them to you unfortunately.
  2. When the quarantine orders came down and people started sheltering in place, they started buying parts for their cars at record breaking pace and checking off some projects on their cars! This is awesome and is what contributed to our record breaking quarter, but it also dried up the parts supply faster than anybody expected. In the beginning of the pandemic, we stocked up big-time on our inventory when we started seeing the sales numbers "go a little crazy" and we know our warehouse distributors did the same. Even with a healthy inventory, we sold out at a rate we've never seen before nor expected, and our supply line for renewing that inventory could not recover as fast as usual (see above). This is all good news as more sales are good for a business, but the supply chain mentioned above in #1 just couldn't keep up. In the end, we're left with a very low-supply of the parts that we need to stock here and the only cure is to let that supply chain heal and regenerate. This low supply spans from our 5X branded products, through major brand labels (Eibach, Bilstein, Gates, etc...), all the way to OEM Mazda parts where shipments from Japan have been slow to refill U.S. based warehouses. Everything just needs a bit of time to catch up basically.

So a pretty detailed explanation huh? I think it's important to share this with you so you understand our decision to take two-weeks off! Normally we would only take a week off like we do every year around the 4th of July, but this year we felt as if we need the supply chain to heal up so we can get all of those parts we need for our inventory to become available again. We hate telling our customers "sorry, but this isn't in stock" and having you cancel your order with us, and that's what has been happening A LOT lately with these supply chain shortages. We feel that taking two-weeks off might help us resupply our inventory a bit and be better prepared to fulfill your orders. In the meantime, we get to heal a bit on our own and take some much needed time off with our family. 

I hope this helps to shed some light on our plans and helps you plan your parts ordering decisions better in return. We love when you choose to shop with us, but also want you to be able to get your parts when you need them, whether that's from us or one of our Miata industry partners. We will still have orders enabled on our site if you choose to order with us, but please be aware that if you place an order, we will not be processing it until we return. We'll be in complete vacation mode too, so we won't be answering emails and will have an out-of-office reply turned on. 

Well that's about it! We'll see you in a few weeks, and thanks as always for shopping with us and choosing to spend your hard earned money with our small-family!

Thanks as always,

John (5X Racing Owner and Parts Specialist)