With annual transaction value exceeding RMB 20 billion, tens of thousands of business entities, and products exported worldwide, the Honghe sweater cluster in Jiaxing has published figures that stand out against the generally pressured backdrop of domestic textile and garment professional markets. More noteworthy than the existing scale is the incremental change: the newly launched integrated domestic-foreign trade service center signals that this five-decade-old sweater cluster is attempting to use a new service logic to connect domestic circulation with overseas sales channels. Its exploration path offers direct reference value for similar industrial belts.
From fragmented production to full-chain services
The transformation of Honghe's sweater industry is not built on a blank slate. Public information shows that a complete industrial chain from raw materials, knitting, to finished garments has been formed, with tens of thousands of business entities constituting a massive flexible production capacity. For a long time, this capacity was mainly released through domestic wholesale and OEM processing, which limited added value and weakened resilience. The newly launched service center precisely targets this structural shortcoming.
The center is located on the third floor of Honghe Zhongchuang Market, covering approximately 4,000 square meters, with four functional modules: service, trade, brand, and incubation. The service module introduces third-party quality inspection agencies, customs declaration, logistics, taxation support, and AR digital product selection tools. The trade module features a 1,200-square-meter product selection center divided into zones for Japan/Korea, Middle East, South America, Russia-Europe-Central Asia, and other target markets. Embedding service support and market segmentation directly into the industrial belt physically reconstructs the efficiency of domestic-foreign trade connectivity.
For buyers, previously connecting with Honghe factories often required visiting each one and comparing prices repeatedly. Now overseas customers can complete targeted product selection in one fixed venue while receiving one-stop support for quality inspection, customs affairs, and logistics. This means transaction costs are systematically compressed, and Honghe sweaters take a substantial step from production-on-order toward production-organized-by-market.
Airport-adjacent advantages and overseas signing
Honghe's dual-circulation push is not an isolated corporate action; it is layered with profound changes in regional transportation. The stable operation of international cargo routes at Jiaxing Nanhu Airport, along with the accelerated construction of the airport new city, has given Honghe an airport-adjacent logistics advantage that county-level industrial belts previously could not access. For seasonal and time-sensitive sweater categories, smooth air cargo channels directly affect order fulfillment and the ability to secure high-value-added orders.
During the event, two rounds of cooperation agreements were signed, one for sweater overseas expansion strategy and another for international logistics channel cooperation. Although specific terms were not fully disclosed, combined with the previous record of the Maoshanpai platform organizing over 200 enterprises to visit more than ten countries and attracting nearly a thousand overseas buyers to Honghe in two years, it is clear that Honghe's foreign trade network has upgraded from scattered exhibitions to systematic layout. Notably, overseas expansion cooperation often involves overseas warehouses, customs facilitation, and channel co-building in destination countries, implying that Honghe's export model may evolve from general trade to overseas pre-warehouse plus localized distribution, which will have ripple effects on cross-border e-commerce sellers and traditional traders.
However, location advantages and signing actions are only necessary conditions. The real test lies in whether service capabilities can be sustained. The launch of the integrated service center can be viewed as Honghe's phased answer to how to leverage airport-adjacent benefits: use a physical service carrier to receive traffic, then use traffic to feed industrial upgrading.
Regional brand and SME tier challenges
The pressure of transformation is equally real. Key phrases repeatedly discussed in public forums include low-price homogenization and involution, common problems in almost all mature industrial belts. The new service center's establishment of an intellectual property and brand guidance station, along with an overseas IP risk warning mechanism, clearly aims to guide enterprises from selling products to selling brands. But branding is not achieved overnight, especially for numerous individual workshops and small/micro enterprises that still lack design R&D capabilities, overseas compliance awareness, and digital operation experience.
The incubation module attempts to address this through a tiered cultivation system: policy guidance for individual workshops, digital transformation support for small/micro enterprises, and globalization guidance for above-scale enterprises. This differentiated approach is commendable, but execution risks formalization: whether policy guidance is precise and whether digital tools truly fit small-batch, fast-response scenarios must be tested in practice. From the industrial belt perspective, strengthening the regional public brand is important, but without effective protection of corporate innovation gains, brand premium cannot be sustained.