A knitwear industrial cluster with an annual transaction value exceeding 20 billion yuan is attempting a path few have successfully walked: merging the service infrastructure for domestic and foreign trade into one. At the opening of the 2026 Honghe Knitwear Season, the Honghe Integrated Domestic-Foreign Trade Service Center was officially launched, alongside two rounds of agreements on overseas expansion strategy and international logistics cooperation. For buyers, the signal is clear: Honghe is no longer just a place for processing orders but is striving to become a global sourcing gateway for knitwear.
Event Background
Honghe's knitwear industry has developed over five decades, with tens of thousands of business entities operating locally and products exported to multiple countries. In the past, growth relied mainly on domestic wholesale and sporadic foreign orders, with price competition squeezing margins. The newly launched service center, located on the third floor of Zhongchuang Market, covers approximately 4,000 square meters and serves as the offline extension of the Mao Shan Pai cross-border e-commerce platform. Over the past two years, this platform has organized over 200 local enterprises to explore markets in more than ten countries and attracted nearly a thousand overseas buyers to Honghe.
The center is divided into four functional sections: a service section that includes an in-house product development center, third-party quality inspection, customs brokerage, logistics, tax services, and AR digital empowerment tools; a trade section featuring a 1,200-square-meter selection center divided into zones for Japan/Korea, the Middle East, South America, and Russia/Europe/Central Asia; a brand section with an intellectual property guidance station and an overseas risk warning mechanism; and an incubation section offering tiered support for small workshops, micro-enterprises, and larger companies. This structure indicates Honghe's ambition to house the entire chain from R&D to quality control, customs clearance, logistics, and branding under one roof, lowering the hidden barriers for SMEs to go global.
Industry Impact
From an industry perspective, Honghe's move aligns with the functional transformation of specialized markets. Markets are no longer mere trading venues but are evolving into full-chain service complexes, with the operational logic shifting from "produce-then-sell" to "consumption guiding upstream production." For seasonal products like knitwear, flexible small-batch and quick-response manufacturing is critical. Overseas clients no longer want to risk a full container of inventory based on a three-month weather forecast; they prefer small trial orders and quick reorders. The AR selection tools and digital solutions introduced by the center cater precisely to this demand.
More noteworthy is the variable introduced by the airport-adjacent location. Jiaxing Nanhu Airport's international cargo routes are operational, and construction of the Airport New City is accelerating, which compresses the physical time from Honghe to overseas markets. Knitwear exports typically rely on sea freight, which involves long lead times and high capital occupation. With air cargo options, high-value-added and time-sensitive orders may return to local factories. This could become Honghe's true moat compared to other knitwear clusters: not cheapness, but speed.
For buyers, the market-specific zoning in the selection center is essentially an attempt at "demand visualization." Japanese and Korean clients prefer delicate stitches and simple designs; Middle Eastern markets value heavy textures and cold resistance; South American customers are more sensitive to color saturation. Zoning allows buyers to match supply chains quickly and reduce back-and-forth sampling costs. However, building a regional public brand takes time, and SMEs often lack awareness of overseas trademark registration. Whether the intellectual property risk warning mechanism can be effectively implemented remains to be seen.