While most Keqiao fabric merchants are fighting over a few cents per meter, a premium line priced at over 100 RMB per meter is quietly thriving in the Dongsheng Road district. Backed by Qiting's decade-long supply chain, Haoli Textile has carved a niche in the light-luxury menswear segment through plant dyeing, natural fibers, and digital tools. This is not merely a product upgrade but a fundamental restructuring of the industry logic—from school uniform fabrics to high-end customization.
Background
Qiting started humbly in 2013, registered in 2014, and operated a store in the East Market focusing on basic school uniform fabrics, building a solid customer base and supply chain through strict quality control. However, by 2018, shrinking margins in conventional fabrics forced a strategic pivot: the company split into two tracks—one developing outdoor functional fabrics and entering the first phase of Dongsheng Road, the other establishing Haoli Textile to target premium business menswear. This dual-brand strategy essentially intercepts different budget segments: Qiting capitalizes on the outdoor functional upgrade, while Haoli positions itself in the natural, eco-friendly premium niche.
Haoli's differentiation lies in craftsmanship and materials: it uses pure natural fibers like wool, silk, and Lyocell, colors are derived from plant extracts rather than chemical dyes, and prices stay in the 100-600 RMB range. This pricing filters out low-end price wars and precisely targets premium menswear brands and designer orders. For buyers, this means a higher fabric cost share, but in exchange, they gain irreplaceable eco-credentials and a quality premium—a trade-off increasingly accepted in the context of consumption polarization.
Industry Impact
The real accelerator for Haoli is its supply chain responsiveness, driven by an integrated trade-and-manufacturing model plus digitalization. Sharing a 15,000-square-meter warehouse, it can ship in-stock orders within one hour and custom orders in 3-10 days. This flexibility is critical for high-end clients who often arrive with swatches and urgent needs. Previously, manual color matching was time-consuming; now, after digitizing, the system can instantly match identical or similar fabrics, making remote communication with overseas clients much easier. For factories, this expands the order radius from local to national and even global, but only if they invest in digital archiving.
The upcoming AI fabric experience hall in Dongsheng Road, equipped with smart body scanning, 3D virtual try-on, fabric visualization, and garment simulation, will integrate offline physical fabrics with online virtual samples. This signals that high-end fabric display and trading are no longer confined to physical stalls; designers and brand buyers can remotely 'feel' the fabric, potentially shortening procurement cycles. For other Keqiao merchants, this is a clear message: digitalization is not optional but an infrastructure for premiumization.
After two years of transformation, the synergy of the dual brands is evident—last year's overall performance improved significantly, and this year's order growth remains strong. Haoli's outdoor fabric line also introduced Italian brushing equipment, exports meet EU's fluorine-free environmental standards, covering European and American markets, and it maintains long-term partnerships with brands like Qiaodun, Xiaobei Bei, and Little Swan. These resources feed back into the premium menswear line. In essence, the dual-brand strategy is not just product separation but a sharing of channels, capacity, and customer resources, reducing the risk of relying on a single track.