With an annual trade volume exceeding 20 billion yuan, tens of thousands of business entities, and products exported worldwide, Honghe's knitwear cluster in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, has delivered an impressive performance. However, the more noteworthy incremental signal is the recent launch of an integrated domestic and foreign trade service center and two rounds of overseas cooperation signings. This indicates that the five-decade-old cluster is shifting from a 'selling products' logic to a dual-engine model of 'selling services plus brands'.
Background
Honghe's transformation is not a spontaneous move. The local area has formed a complete industrial chain from raw materials, knitting, to finished garments. Meanwhile, the regular operation of international cargo routes at Jiaxing Nanhu Airport and the accelerated construction of the Airport New City have injected new variables of airport economy into the cluster. The newly launched service center, located on the third floor of Honghe Zhongchuang Market, covers approximately 4,000 square meters and serves as the offline carrier of the 'Maoshanpai' cross-border e-commerce platform. Over the past two years, the platform has organized more than 200 local enterprises to explore markets in over ten countries and attracted nearly a thousand overseas buyers to visit Honghe.
The center is functionally divided into four sections: the service section houses an in-house product development center and introduces third-party quality inspection, complemented by customs declaration, logistics, taxation, and AR digital tools, directly targeting the pain point of low-price involution; the trade section features a 1,200-square-meter selection center with zones divided by target markets such as Japan/Korea, Middle East, South America, and Russia/Europe/Central Asia; the brand section establishes an intellectual property guidance station and builds an overseas risk warning mechanism; and the incubation section designs tiered cultivation paths for workshops, small and micro enterprises, and above-scale enterprises. The underlying message is to consolidate scattered order matching, quality control, and brand building into a single public service platform, reducing the trial-and-error costs for enterprises operating independently.
Industrial Impact
For buyers, the country-specific zones in the selection center mean more efficient matching—overseas clients can view samples centrally without visiting factories one by one. For local factories, the design, quality inspection, and digital empowerment provided by the service section actually help them break the old cycle of 'order taking—processing—price suppression.' Ren Xingzhou, a specially invited expert on domestic trade from the Ministry of Commerce, captured the essence: the operational logic of professional markets is shifting from 'produce what—circulate what—consume what' to 'consumer-side reverse guidance of upstream production.' Honghe's current move is a tangible response to this logic.
A deeper point is the chemical reaction between airport-adjacent location and industrial services. International cargo routes compress logistics time, while the embedding of overseas warehouses and customs clearance services lowers the threshold for SMEs to go global. In the past, knitwear enterprises often relied on foreign trade companies or exhibitions, resulting in long information and logistics chains. Now, the service center brings customs clearance, logistics, and overseas warehouses to the 'doorstep,' enabling flexible small-batch, quick-response manufacturing to directly connect with overseas orders. For foreign trade enterprises, this means that delivery reliability and performance stability will replace pure price advantage as new competitive dimensions.
Of course, transformation will not happen overnight. Building a regional public brand requires sustained investment, and the implementation of an overseas IP risk warning mechanism tests execution details. However, Honghe's chosen path—integrating dispersed resources through a public service platform, connecting to global markets via an airport hub, and enhancing added value with digital tools—provides a reference coordinate for similar knitwear clusters nationwide. When profit margins in domestic trade are squeezed and uncertainties in foreign trade increase, whoever can first unblock the bottlenecks of 'dual circulation of domestic and foreign trade' will gain the initiative in the next round of industry reshuffling.