With annual transactions exceeding 20 billion yuan and tens of thousands of business entities, Jiaxing's Honghe knitwear cluster has long been a powerhouse in China's sweater industry. But the real news from the 2026 Honghe Knitwear Season is not the scale—it's the signal that the cluster is trying to rewrite its five-decade-old playbook of low-cost manufacturing and volume-driven sales, leveraging its airport-adjacent location and digital services.
Background
The inauguration of the Honghe Knitwear Integrated Domestic and Foreign Trade Service Center was the centerpiece of the event. Located on the third floor of Zhongchuang Market, the 4,000-square-meter facility is not a simple showroom but the offline carrier of the "Maoshanpai" cross-border e-commerce platform. Its functional divisions are telling: a service section with third-party quality inspection and customs, logistics, and tax support; a trading section featuring a 1,200-square-meter sourcing hall segmented by overseas markets such as Japan/Korea, the Middle East, South America, and Russia/Europe/Central Asia; a brand section with IP protection and risk-warning mechanisms; and an incubation section offering tiered support for workshops, small businesses, and larger enterprises.
What does this structure imply? Previously, knitwear companies went overseas individually, scrambling for orders. Now, local government and platform are bundling R&D, quality control, logistics, compliance, and branding into a public service package. For small and medium factories, this directly lowers the barrier to international markets—they can export without building their own teams. The market-segmented sourcing hall shifts the paradigm from "produce-then-sell" to "sell-then-produce," allowing buyers to place orders based on direct demand.
Industrial Implications
Honghe's timing is strategic, tied to the operational international cargo routes at Jiaxing Nanhu Airport and the accelerating construction of the airport new city. For a seasonal product like knitwear, airport proximity is critical—every day saved in delivery can mean capturing an additional round of reorders. Traditional sea freight often involves month-long lead times; with air cargo, small-batch, quick-response manufacturing becomes feasible. This aligns with the "flexible small-batch quick-response" model advocated by experts from the China National Textile and Apparel Council.
More profound is the logic shift noted by Ren Xingzhou, a domestic trade expert: professional markets are evolving from single trading venues into full-chain industrial service complexes, with operational logic moving from "produce-what, circulate-what, consume-what" to "consumption-end guiding upstream production." For Honghe, this means it cannot merely focus on production. The sourcing hall, brand guidance station, and digital tools are essentially helping factories understand overseas consumer preferences and using data to guide design and production. Those who complete this transformation first will escape the trap of low-price homogenization.
At the enterprise level, impacts vary. Large enterprises may leverage the opportunity to globalize, shifting some capacity to overseas warehouses or building proprietary brands. Small businesses need to address digital transformation and compliance. Individual workshops have the most immediate chance to formalize through policy guidance and avoid elimination. Notably, the Maoshanpai platform has organized over 200 companies to explore more than ten countries and attracted nearly 1,000 overseas buyers to Honghe in the past two years—indicating that channel validation has already occurred. The service center's launch turns ad-hoc connections into a permanent mechanism.
Practical Recommendations
For Sourcing Buyers - Use the segmented sourcing hall to compare factory capabilities and prices by target market, shortening the supplier discovery cycle. - Leverage third-party quality inspection reports to pre-check products before ordering, reducing cross-border return risks. - Experiment with small-batch, high-frequency air freight reorders to test new styles and avoid inventory pile-up.
For Foreign Trade Enterprises - Prioritize the service center's integrated customs, logistics, and tax support to outsource non-core tasks and focus on product development and customer relations. - Use the IP risk-warning mechanism to conduct trademark searches and registrations before entering new markets, avoiding infringement disputes. - Participate in the tiered incubation program to access policy support for digital transformation or global expansion, smoothly transitioning from selling products to selling brands.
The Honghe Knitwear Season may look like a trade event, but it's actually a proactive response to external pressures. The 20 billion yuan transaction volume is a testament to the past fifty years, but whether it can forge a new path of brand premium and flexible manufacturing through airport economy and digital services is the real question for the next five years. For similar professional markets nationwide, Honghe's experiment—whether in the service center's operational model or the "consolidate domestic, expand foreign" path—offers an observable blueprint.