With annual transactions surpassing 20 billion yuan and tens of thousands of business entities, the Honghe knitwear industry in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, has built a solid foundation over five decades. But the number that deserves industry attention is not the stock figure—it is the recent launch of a 4,000-square-meter integrated service center for domestic and foreign trade, encompassing services, trade, branding, and incubation. This move carries significance far beyond the facility itself: it signals an attempt by a traditional production-oriented market to answer a common question—when domestic trade margins peak and foreign orders become fragmented, how can an industrial belt serve two markets and two types of buyers with one set of infrastructure?
From Selling Space to Serving: Functional Reconstruction of Production Markets
The newly launched service center is not a simple physical expansion. Its internal divisions reveal a clear service orientation: a 1,200-square-meter product selection center segmented by overseas target markets (Japan/Korea, Middle East, South America, Russia-Europe-Central Asia); a service block offering third-party quality inspection, customs, logistics, tax, and AR digital tools; and a branding block with IP guidance and overseas risk warnings. This combination of selection, service, and branding effectively centralizes intermediary services that were previously scattered, allowing factories and overseas buyers to handle sourcing, inspection, compliance, and transactions under one roof.
For buyers, this intensification means lower sourcing costs and higher trust. Previously, overseas small and medium buyers had to visit multiple markets and intermediaries to find goods, facing opaque information and inconsistent quality. The market-segmented selection center directly reduces comparison costs, while third-party inspection partially resolves quality trust in cross-border transactions. This is the core of the shift from a "landlord logic" to a "service logic"—no longer relying solely on rent but creating incremental value through transaction matching and compliance services.
Airport Proximity and Digitalization: Honghe's Two Distinctive Cards
Honghe's push for integrated trade largely relies on its unique location. The smooth operation of international cargo routes at Jiaxing Nanhu Airport and the accelerated construction of the airport new city grant Honghe an aviation-adjacent advantage that many inland clusters lack. For seasonal products like knitwear, air freight means capturing fashion windows, especially for high-value, small-batch, quick-replenishment orders. This "airport + industry" combination is reshaping the low-efficiency model of traditional sea freight, enabling the belt to undertake cross-border orders with higher time sensitivity.
The other card is digitalization. Reports indicate that over the past two years, the local cross-border e-commerce platform "Maoshanpai" has organized more than 200 enterprises to explore markets in over ten countries, attracting nearly a thousand overseas buyers to Honghe. Though modest, these numbers validate a path: using online platforms for lead generation and offline service centers for reception, forming a closed loop of "online acquisition—offline experience—transaction closure." This model is not merely "e-commerce + market"; it embeds AI design, digital marketing, and small-order fast-reaction capabilities into traditional manufacturing. The essence is to use data to guide production in reverse, avoiding the old path of "blind production and low-price clearance."
The Real Test: Branding and Tiered Upgrading
The center's launch is only the starting point; deep challenges remain. Experts' suggestions to "escape low-price homogenization" and "shift from selling products to selling brands" highlight the long-standing pain point. Among tens of thousands of entities, most are small and micro enterprises and individual workshops, highly price-sensitive with limited R&D and branding capacity. The incubation block attempts a tiered cultivation system—policy guidance for workshops, digital transformation support for small businesses, and globalization guidance for larger enterprises—but the effectiveness depends on the availability of professional talent and service institutions, not just hardware investment.
Another variable is whether "domestic-foreign trade integration" can truly materialize. Domestic and foreign trade differ significantly in standards, settlement, compliance, and consumer habits; a single product often cannot meet both market demands simultaneously. The selection center segments by overseas markets, but how will it accommodate domestic buyers? The service block includes customs, logistics, and tax support, but whether it can truly break through inter-departmental bottlenecks remains to be tested. If Honghe's experience is to become a national model, it must achieve substantive institutional innovation, not just service stacking.
Implications: Professional Markets Enter a "Functional Transition" Window
Honghe's move is not isolated. Many domestic professional markets are transitioning from single trading venues to industrial service complexes, but few succeed. The key difference is that most markets remain at the surface level of adding service items, while Honghe attempts to use "integrated domestic-foreign trade" as a main line to systematize scattered services—this may be its most referential value. For other production-oriented clusters, the lesson is not Honghe's specific practices but its decision logic: first define one's position in the dual circulation, then reverse-engineer the required infrastructure and service capabilities.
Returning to the knitwear industry itself, seasonality, fast fashion, and cross-border e-commerce are reshaping supply chains. Honghe's choice to intensify integration now essentially aims to seize the window where consumer demand guides upstream production. But the window will not stay open forever. As neighboring clusters advance similar layouts, the true moat will not be the center's floor area but the data, standards, and trust relationships accumulated within.