In Keqiao's China Textile City, the survival rules for fabric merchants are being rewritten. While most struggle in price wars over conventional fabrics, a merchant named Haoli Textile in the Dongcheng Road outdoor fabric zone has managed to price its fabrics at 100-600 yuan per meter while maintaining steady order growth. Behind this lies a twelve-year journey from school uniforms to luxury menswear, and a digital transformation experiment in traditional fabric trading.
Transformation Path: From Mass Market to Niche Blue Ocean
Haoli's transformation began with the entrepreneurial efforts of its sister brand, Qiting, in 2013. Initially, Qiting operated from a storefront in the East Market, focusing on basic school uniform fabrics, building a stable customer base through solid quality control. By 2018, profit margins on conventional fabrics were squeezed, and industry competition intensified. The brand's leadership realized that relying solely on volume was unsustainable. A strategic pivot unfolded: Qiting shifted toward functional outdoor fabrics, while a new brand, Haoli Textile, was created to focus on high-end business menswear, establishing a dual-brand independent operation.
This move was not blind. The Dongcheng Road area attracts numerous quality brands, e-commerce sellers, and fashion designers who demand higher fabric precision and offer better order conversion. Haoli's general manager, Li Xiongzhen, stated that choosing to open a second-phase storefront here was precisely because of this customer profile. Unlike mass-market fabric merchants, Haoli's product line from inception targeted natural and eco-friendly positioning: using pure natural fibers such as wool, silk, and lyocell, with colors achieved through plant extraction, completely abandoning traditional chemical dyeing. This positioning directly determined its price band—100-600 yuan per meter—precisely targeting high-end menswear brands and designer fashion orders, thereby avoiding price competition in low-end fabrics.
Supply Chain and Digitalization: Dual Engines for High-End Upgrade
High-end fabric business requires more than positioning; supply chain capability is an invisible threshold. Haoli leverages its integrated factory advantage, sharing 15,000 square meters of large-scale warehousing, adopting a dual model of spot goods and custom orders. Spot goods can handle small urgent orders, custom order cycles are controlled within 3-10 days, and with complete inventory, the fastest delivery can be achieved in one hour. This rapid response capability is crucial for serving high-end clients with strict requirements on pattern and texture.
More noteworthy is its digitalization attempt. Li Xiongzhen introduced that Haoli has participated in the digital fabric construction of the AI Fabric mini-program, completing digital filing for core fabrics such as waffle, health knit, double-sided plain weave, mesh, air layer, and pique. In practical use, the system's one-click matching of similar fabrics has greatly improved sample-seeking efficiency. Previously, designers would bring fragmented fabric swatches for comparison; manual flipping and color card matching were time-consuming, and remote communication with foreign trade clients was even more difficult. Now, the system quickly retrieves and matches, saving labor time and improving matching accuracy. Behind this, the AI Fabric experience hall equipped in the Dongcheng Road outdoor fabric zone is about to enter trial operation, featuring intelligent body measurement, 3D virtual fitting, fabric visual creation, and garment simulation, displaying physical fabrics and virtual samples online and offline. For high-end fabric merchants, this is not just a tool but an extension of service capability.
Dual-Brand Synergy: Sharing Channel and Capacity Dividends
While independently operating high-end fabric business, Haoli does not start from scratch. It shares Qiting's mature industry chain facilities, including Italian-imported napping machines for fleece fabric production, continuously expanding capacity to bring overall supply chain bargaining power and speed improvements. In foreign trade, exported fabrics meet European standard fluorine-free environmental requirements, with long-term cooperation clients including Joeone (8-10 years), Xiaobeibei, Yingqi, Macedonia, and Little Bacnana. These resources open channels for Haoli to reach high-end menswear customers, forming two-way traffic.
Two years into the strategic transformation, the synergy of dual brands is evident. Li Xiongzhen revealed that overall brand performance improved significantly last year, and this year's order growth maintains a good momentum. However, this model also faces challenges: how to ensure color fastness and batch stability of plant dyeing? Is the return on investment for digital tools sustainable? Is the capacity of the high-end fabric market sufficient to accommodate more merchants? These questions still require time to answer.