With annual transactions exceeding 20 billion yuan, tens of thousands of business entities, and products sold worldwide, Honghe sweater industry in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, has built a solid foundation over decades. Yet what truly deserves attention is not these existing figures but new variables: the launch of an integrated domestic-foreign trade service center and the airport economy brought by the international cargo routes of Jiaxing Nanhu Airport. When a traditional sweater industrial belt meets cross-border e-commerce and air logistics, a reconstruction of growth logic is underway.
Event Background
The 2026 Honghe Sweater Season recently opened under the theme "Beautiful Honghe, Weaving the World." At the opening ceremony, the Honghe Sweater Integrated Domestic-Foreign Trade Service Center was officially unveiled, and two rounds of cooperation agreements were signed for sweater overseas expansion and international logistics channels. Xia Minfeng, Secretary-General of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, along with association leaders and buyers from over ten cities including Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Chengdu, attended the business matching sessions. These moves signal a clear intention: Honghe is no longer satisfied with being a production base but aims to become a hub node for dual domestic-international circulation.
The 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. Over the past two years, Maoshanpai has organized more than 200 local enterprises to explore markets in over ten countries, attracting nearly 1,000 overseas buyers to Honghe. The new center is structured into four segments: services, trade, branding, and incubation. The services segment includes an in-house product R&D center and third-party quality inspection. The trade segment features a 1,200-square-meter selection center divided into zones for Japan/Korea, Middle East, South America, and Russia-Europe-Central Asia. The branding segment establishes IP guidance and risk warning mechanisms, while the incubation segment provides tiered support for workshops and SMEs. This architecture indicates Honghe's attempt to consolidate scattered foreign trade services into one physical space.
Industrial Impact
For buyers, the service center reduces trust and time costs in cross-border procurement. Previously, overseas clients had to visit factories one by one for price comparison; now they can view samples by target market in one stop and access customs, logistics, tax, and financial services. This model shares logic with Yiwu's market procurement trade, but Honghe emphasizes its airport advantage—the operation of international cargo routes at Jiaxing Nanhu Airport compresses the time from factory to overseas warehouse. For cross-border e-commerce sellers relying on quick replenishment, this means a shorter supply chain response cycle.
For local factories and foreign trade firms, transformation pressure and opportunity coexist. Xu Jianhua, Chair of the Circulation Branch of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, proposed leveraging the airport hub to streamline customs, logistics, and overseas warehousing, while promoting AI design and flexible small-batch quick-response manufacturing. Ren Xingzhou, a domestic trade expert from the Ministry of Commerce, noted that specialized markets are upgrading from single trading venues to full-chain service complexes, shifting from "produce-what-you-circulate" to "consumer-demand-guided production." These judgments target Honghe's longstanding pain points: dominated by OEM processing, thin margins, and vulnerability to order fluctuations. The branding and incubation segments aim to push enterprises from selling products to selling brands, from passive order-taking to proactive global market layout.
It is worth noting that Honghe's sweater industry has a 50-year history, and this transformation is not starting from scratch. Chamber President Dong Xialiang emphasized that the accelerated construction of the airport new city opens a new pattern of deep industry-city integration. However, whether the airport economy can translate into industrial competitiveness depends on the smooth connection of three links: local enterprises' willingness to invest in digital transformation, whether overseas channels can bring sustained effective orders, and whether the regional public brand can build recognition in overseas markets. Currently, the service center's functions cover the first two, while the third requires longer market cultivation.