Keqiao's China Textile City is busier than a month ago, but the order structure has diverged from the traditional peak-season logic. Foot traffic is up across Dongsheng Road, the East Market, and the North Market, with autumn-winter fabrics entering a concentrated stocking period. Thermal fabrics, wool blends, knitted elastic cloth, and brushed materials are seeing dense inquiries. What matters more than foot traffic, however, is how orders are being placed. Bulk purchasing is giving way to small-batch trial orders, and the market is showing a pattern of rising volumes, stable prices, and fragmented orders. This signals that downstream brands are less tolerant of inventory risk, shifting procurement decisions from betting on the peak season to controlling the pace.
Fragmented Orders: Not Weak Demand, but Front-Loaded Risk
Since mid-to-late September, walk-in customers have kept increasing. Many buyers are rushing to confirm sample fabrics before the National Day holiday and scheduling production after it. Merchants are sending out dozens of color cards daily, with online inquiries and offline sample reviews happening simultaneously. On the surface, this looks like peak-season bustle. In substance, the supply chain is actively compressing order sizes and extending trial sales cycles.
For factories, small-batch rapid replenishment means more complex scheduling and higher unit costs, but it also reduces inventory buildup risk. For buyers, fragmented ordering demands stronger sampling speed and flexible delivery from fabric suppliers. The old model of riding one hit product through an entire season is fading. Keqiao merchants are responding by preparing color cards and sample fabrics in advance and moving the craft confirmation process ahead of the holiday to trade time for space.
The home textile segment follows the same logic. Demand for minimalist solid-color bedding, wedding-series fabrics, and sofa fabrics is rising steadily, but customers are stocking up early and placing orders in batches to build momentum for fourth-quarter home decoration consumption. Fabric composition, color fastness, and eco-friendly processes have become high-frequency topics in storefront communication, indicating that purchasing decisions are shifting from price orientation to comprehensive quality assessment.
Cost Transmission: Rising Raw Material Prices Squeeze Fabric Margins, Cautious Ordering Becomes the Norm
Recently, upstream chemical fiber and cotton yarn prices have been fluctuating upward, and cost pressure has been transmitted to the fabric end. Merchants are more cautious in taking orders, generally insisting on case-by-case negotiation and strictly controlling order risk. The direct consequence is that quotation validity periods are shortening, long-term price locking is becoming harder, and the price game between buyers and sellers is retreating from annual frameworks to order-by-order confirmation.
For buyers, this means the window for locking in prices early is narrowing, and delayed orders may face higher costs. For factories, raw material volatility combined with small-batch rapid replenishment is squeezing profits from both ends, making a pure low-price competition strategy unsustainable. More and more operators are reducing stock of ordinary commodity fabrics and shifting focus to new materials and new process development.
The export side shows even clearer changes. Overseas buyers prefer eco-friendly recycled fabrics and functional fabrics, which have stronger pricing power. From waterproof-breathable and anti-static fabrics to recycled polyester and eco-friendly dyeing and finishing fabrics, innovative materials are becoming key chips for expanding into overseas markets. Keqiao fabrics continue to be exported to more than 190 countries and regions, but the export structure is migrating from high-volume, low-price toward quality-competitive, price-stable.
Channel Restructuring: Livestreaming and Exhibition-Market Linkage Are Changing Customer Acquisition
Ahead of the National Day holiday, many operators are leveraging old customer resources and online channels to push new products, continuously exploring domestic and international market opportunities. Merchants are packaging newly developed fabric sample cards and real-shot videos and sending them to customers at home and abroad through online channels to promote autumn-winter new fabrics in advance. Livestreaming commerce has become a mainstream trend in the market, with multiple merchants conducting online fabric livestreams from their storefronts, showcasing texture and patterns, and receiving remote customers online, breaking geographical limits.
The integrated model of online traffic generation and offline sample viewing is changing the customer acquisition radius of traditional textile cities. Even if customers cannot visit the market in person, they can efficiently complete fabric selection communication. Meanwhile, the exhibition-market linkage model continues to work, with merchants shifting from passively waiting for customers to proactively connecting with exhibitions and overseas buyers, opening up online and offline customer acquisition channels. The implication for buyers is that fabric selection no longer depends on physically visiting the market, but places higher demands on fabric suppliers' online presentation capabilities and response speed.
Market management is also supporting pre-holiday transactions, with environmental improvements, fire safety, and logistics support advancing in parallel. The logistics area sees frequent vehicle traffic, with packing, loading, and shipping working overtime. Rolls of fabric are being dispatched to major garment factories and export ports across the country.