The Honghe knitwear cluster in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, with an annual transaction value exceeding 20 billion yuan and tens of thousands of business entities, is attempting to answer a question that has troubled domestic specialized markets for years: where will the next growth engine come from when the traditional wholesale model peaks? The 2026 Honghe Knitwear Season provided a possible answer—welding domestic trade advantages with foreign trade growth through a physical service carrier.
Background
At the opening event, the Honghe Knitwear Integrated Domestic-Foreign Trade Service Center was officially launched. This is the offline carrier of the local cross-border e-commerce platform “Maoshanpai,” covering approximately 4,000 square meters on the third floor of the Honghe Zhongchuang Market. Over the past two years, Maoshanpai has organized more than 200 local enterprises to explore markets in over ten countries and attracted nearly a thousand overseas buyers to Honghe. The center's completion means these scattered overseas efforts are now integrated into a permanent, full-chain service system.
From a locational perspective, the smooth operation of international cargo routes at Jiaxing Nanhu Airport and the accelerated construction of the Airport New City provide Honghe with an airport-economy advantage it previously lacked. For knitwear—a category with strong seasonality and high demand for quick response—air freight timeliness directly determines whether enterprises can enter mid-to-high-end overseas markets. In the past, relying on sea freight often caused enterprises to miss fashion windows; the opening of air corridors is rewriting this constraint.
Industrial Impact
The design of the center's four functional sections reveals a targeted response to industry pain points. The service section includes an in-house R&D center, third-party quality inspection, customs declaration, logistics, tax services, and AR digital tools, addressing the compliance and quality-control barriers that small enterprises cannot easily overcome alone. The trade section features a 1,200-square-meter selection center divided into zones for Japan/Korea, Middle East, South America, and Russia-Europe-Central Asia, effectively bringing overseas market selection logic to the production site and reducing supply-demand mismatches.
More noteworthy are the brand and incubation sections. The brand guidance station and overseas intellectual property risk warning mechanism indicate that the cluster recognizes the unsustainability of low-price exports—without brand endorsement, enterprises only earn processing fees and are vulnerable to overseas IP disputes. The tiered incubation system (from individual workshops to small enterprises to larger ones) aims to provide upgrade paths for entities of different sizes, avoiding one-size-fits-all policies.
For buyers, the direct impact is a hidden reduction in procurement costs. Previously, overseas buyers had to visit multiple stalls for price comparison and quality checks; now they can complete one-stop selection by region in the 1,200-square-meter center. For local factories, airport logistics combined with digital marketing tools means small-batch, quick-response is no longer off-limits for foreign trade orders but can become a normalized production capability.
Practical Recommendations
For Buyers - Prioritize the trade section's regional selection zones to directly match suppliers based on target markets, reducing intermediary price-comparison steps. - Use AR digital selection tools for remote initial screening, then combine with on-site factory visits to significantly reduce cross-border procurement travel costs and decision risks.
For Foreign Trade Enterprises - Incorporate air freight into shipping plans; for high-value, tight-deadline orders, consider air channels to trade timeliness for premium pricing. - Register overseas trademarks and establish IP risk warnings early, utilizing the brand section's guidance resources to avoid infringement barriers in target markets.
The significance of the Honghe model lies in its refusal to simply replicate Yiwu's “market procurement” path. Instead, based on the deep industrial chain of a single knitwear category, it reconstructs domestic-foreign trade connections using airport location and digital tools. Whether this attempt succeeds depends on whether service implementation truly meets enterprise needs in subsequent operations, rather than remaining a nominal listing. Nevertheless, it provides a transformation case worth tracking for similar specialized market clusters nationwide.