With annual transactions exceeding 20 billion yuan and tens of thousands of business entities, Honghe's knitwear industry in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, appears massive but has long been plagued by low-price homogenized competition and single-channel exports. At the 2026 Meihonghe Sweater Season, a 4,000-square-meter integrated domestic-foreign trade service center was officially launched, attempting to answer an old question with a four-pronged approach: how can a traditional knitwear cluster escape its OEM fate?
Background
Honghe's transformation pressure is not unfounded. Public industry data shows that although local market transactions exceed 20 billion yuan, most enterprises still rely on OEM processing with squeezed profit margins. Meanwhile, the opening of international cargo routes at Jiaxing Nanhu Airport and the accelerated construction of the airport new city provide new logistics channels for knitwear exports—an opportunity that also raises demands for customs clearance, overseas warehousing, and other supporting services.
Against this backdrop, the launch of the Honghe Knitwear Integrated Domestic-Foreign Trade Service Center is seen as a milestone. Located on the third floor of Honghe Zhongchuang Market and built on the Maoshanpai cross-border e-commerce platform, it has already organized over 200 enterprises to explore markets in more than ten countries over the past two years, attracting nearly a thousand overseas buyers. The center's design is targeted: a 1,200-square-meter selection hall divided by target markets such as Japan/Korea, Middle East, South America, and Russia-Europe-Central Asia, allowing overseas buyers to source efficiently; an in-house product R&D center and third-party quality inspection address long-standing design and quality shortcomings.
Industry Impact
For buyers, this layout signals a shift in supply chain logic. In the past, foreign trade orders relied on intermediaries; now, a selection center plus direct overseas clients may compress circulation costs—but only if enterprises can respond quickly to small-batch, fast-reorder demands. The center introduces AR digital empowerment tools and AI-driven design promotion, precisely to match this flexible production trend. In other words, whoever can use digital tools to reduce sampling and communication costs will gain an edge in direct overseas procurement.
A deeper change lies in brand awareness. Honghe Knitwear Chamber of Commerce President Dong Xialiang emphasized the shift from selling products to selling brands, and the center's establishment of an intellectual property and brand guidance station, along with an overseas IP risk warning mechanism, sends a clear signal: regional public brands will become the core asset for clusters to counter involution. For factories, this means an era of purely competing on capacity is ending; design R&D and compliance capabilities will determine bargaining power.
The release of airport-adjacent location advantages may reshape export logistics cost structures. With stable international cargo routes at Nanhu Airport, export timeliness and flexibility will improve significantly, especially benefiting emerging markets like Russia-Europe-Central Asia. Ren Xingzhou, a domestic trade expert from the Ministry of Commerce, noted at the event that specialized markets have evolved from single trading venues into full-chain industry service complexes, where consumer demand guides upstream production—a logic that will force Honghe enterprises to shift from producing what they can to manufacturing what the market demands.