In Honghe, Jiaxing, Zhejiang, a knitwear cluster with an annual transaction volume exceeding 20 billion yuan is attempting to answer a common industry question: when traditional export orders fluctuate and domestic demand growth slows, how can a specialized market open both domestic and international channels simultaneously? The recent launch of the Honghe Knitwear Integrated Domestic and International Trade Service Center offers a sample worth observing.
Location Advantage and Industrial Heritage
Honghe's knitwear industry was not built overnight. After fifty years of development, the area now hosts tens of thousands of business entities, with products reaching multiple countries and regions. What makes this move significant is the maturity of external conditions—Jiaxing Nanhu Airport's international cargo routes are operational, and the airport new city is accelerating construction. The time efficiency brought by the airport economy offsets the logistics sensitivity of seasonal knitwear products.
In other words, Honghe's choice to promote integrated domestic and international trade now is not merely a policy response but a natural outcome of accumulated industrial supporting capabilities and locational advantages. For buyers, this means the chain from ordering to cross-border delivery could be significantly shortened, reducing inventory risks.
Service Center's Functional Breakdown
The newly launched service center is located on the third floor of Honghe Zhongchuang Market, covering about 4,000 square meters, and serves as the offline carrier of the Maoshanpai cross-border e-commerce platform. Its internal operations are organized into four major sections: the service section includes an in-house product R&D center, third-party quality inspection, and supporting customs declaration, logistics, tax, and AR digital tools; the trade section features a 1,200-square-meter product selection center divided by overseas target markets such as Japan/Korea, Middle East, South America, and Russia-Europe-Central Asia; the brand section establishes an intellectual property guidance station and an overseas risk warning mechanism; the incubation section provides tiered support for individual workshops, small businesses, and larger enterprises to promote digital transformation and global expansion.
This configuration implies that Honghe aims to integrate resources previously scattered across government, associations, and enterprises into one physical space, lowering the invisible barriers for SMEs to go global. Previously, the Maoshanpai platform had organized over 200 local enterprises to explore markets in more than ten countries, attracting nearly a thousand overseas buyers to Honghe. The service center's launch normalizes and institutionalizes this capability.
Leap from Selling Products to Selling Brands
Notably, the service center includes a dedicated brand section and emphasizes building a regional public brand. In the past, Honghe knitwear was mostly exported as OEM or white-label products, yielding thin margins and vulnerability to order fluctuations. Now, through the IP guidance station and risk warning mechanism, enterprises are steered away from price competition toward brand premium—this is the core difficulty of industrial upgrading.
Industry experts at the event noted that specialized markets are evolving from mere trading venues into full-chain industrial service complexes, with operational logic shifting from 'produce and sell' to 'consumption guides upstream production.' This means Honghe enterprises must more keenly capture demand changes in overseas niche markets and respond through flexible small-batch, quick-response manufacturing. For factories, this requires greater production line adaptability rather than mere scale.
The Path to Dual-Circulation Implementation
At the opening ceremony, two rounds of agreements on knitwear overseas expansion and international logistics cooperation were signed. Combined with the service center's launch, Honghe has initially established a framework of 'strengthening domestic trade and expanding foreign markets.' In practice, domestic trade provides stable cash flow and testing grounds for foreign trade, while foreign trade introduces advanced design and quality standards to domestic operations—they complement each other.
However, challenges remain—how to avoid homogenization in regional branding, how to continuously expand overseas channels, and whether digital tools can truly reach small workshops. Whether Honghe's experience can be replicated depends on its ability to maintain grassroots innovation while developing standardized service modules.