The Honghe knitwear industrial cluster in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, with an annual transaction volume exceeding 20 billion yuan, is attempting to answer a common industry dilemma: when traditional wholesale markets face slowing domestic demand and fragmented foreign orders, can existing advantages be converted into new growth channels? The 2026 Honghe Knitwear Season offers an answer—a 4,000-square-meter offline service center that reorganizes tens of thousands of scattered business entities into an integrated domestic-foreign trade chain.
Event Background
Honghe is not starting from scratch. After five decades of industrial accumulation, the area hosts tens of thousands of knitwear businesses, with products exported to multiple countries. The noteworthy change is on the service side: the newly launched integrated domestic-foreign trade service center is located on the third floor of Honghe Zhongchuang Market, serving as the offline carrier of the Maoshanpai cross-border e-commerce platform. Over the past two years, the platform has organized over 200 local enterprises to explore markets in more than ten countries, attracting nearly a thousand overseas buyers to visit Honghe.
The service center is structured into four sections: service, trade, branding, and incubation. The trade section features a 1,200-square-meter product selection center divided by target markets such as Japan/Korea, the Middle East, South America, and Russia-Europe-Central Asia, allowing overseas clients to select goods by regional preference rather than navigating mixed stalls. The service section introduces third-party quality inspection and AR digital tools, directly targeting the common pain point of "low-price homogenization" in origin-based clusters—when quality inspection and design capabilities are embedded at the front end of transactions, factories can shift their pricing logic from "per kilogram" to "added value per garment."
Industrial Impact
For buyers, this layout effectively reduces the hidden costs of cross-border procurement. Previously, overseas small and medium buyers needed to fly to multiple origins to compare suppliers; now they can complete targeted selection within one center, supported by one-stop customs clearance, logistics, and tax services, potentially shortening decision cycles. For local factories, especially individual workshops lacking foreign trade teams, the incubation section provides a tiered development path: from policy guidance to digital transformation, and then to global layout for larger enterprises—essentially replacing costly trial-and-error with public services.
A deeper signal lies in the shift of locational logic. Jiaxing Nanhu Airport's international cargo routes are operational, and the airport new city is accelerating construction, upgrading Honghe from a traditional "market + highway" model to "market + airport." This not only improves logistics efficiency but also changes order structures—higher-value, small-batch, quick-response knitwear orders may increase, an area where flexible supply chains excel. Xu Jianhua, director of the Circulation Branch of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, emphasized leveraging the airport hub to integrate customs, logistics, and overseas warehousing, echoing this trend.
Ren Xingzhou, a domestic trade expert from the Ministry of Commerce, highlighted a deeper operational shift: specialized markets are moving from "produce-what, circulate-what, consume-what" to "consumer demand guiding upstream production." This means Honghe's service center cannot merely be a physical space landlord but must become a hub for demand data—using overseas selection preferences to guide local factories in adjusting styles, materials, and production rhythms. If this mechanism runs smoothly, Honghe can avoid head-on low-price competition with markets like Yiwu, instead forming differentiated supply based on regional characteristics.
Of course, challenges remain clear. The hardest part of industrial transformation is never hardware investment, but the cognitive upgrade of tens of thousands of micro-entities. Two hundred enterprises going abroad and nearly a thousand buyers visiting are still a minority relative to tens of thousands. Whether the center can truly shift enterprises from "selling products" to "selling brands" depends on whether it can continuously generate measurable order increments—after all, for knitwear practitioners accustomed to fast turnover, only visible returns drive change.