In Keqiao's China Textile City, Dongsheng Road is emerging as a window into the transformation of local fabric merchants. While many still compete on price in the mass market, the dual-brand combination of Qiting and Haoli Textiles has completed a decade-long shift from school uniform fabrics to light-luxury menswear—a path offering significant reference for SMEs facing upgrade anxiety.
The Logic of Transformation: An Inevitable Move from Red to Blue Ocean
Qiting, founded in 2013, initially operated in the East Market, specializing in school uniform base fabrics, building a stable customer base and supply chain through consistent quality control. However, intensified competition in 2018 squeezed margins on conventional fabrics, triggering a strategic pivot. That year, Qiting expanded into functional outdoor fabrics and established Haoli Textiles to target high-end business menswear, forming a dual-brand independent operation. This decision reflects a clear-eyed recognition of mass-market involution: low-value-added products inevitably descend into price wars, and only migration to high-value-added niches can build barriers.
Product Positioning: Natural Fibers and Craft as a Moat
Haoli's differentiation lies in its product itself. The line uses pure natural fibers such as wool, silk, and lyocell, replacing chemical dyeing with plant-extracted coloring, highlighting eco-friendliness. This process choice directly determines its price band—100-600 RMB per meter—precisely targeting high-end menswear brands and designer orders, avoiding price competition in the low-end market. For buyers, this means fabrics possess recognizable texture and storytelling that support premium pricing of finished garments; for factories, higher unit prices bring better margins but also test process stability and delivery capability.
Digital Empowerment: How AI Transforms High-End Fabric Service
The pain point in high-end fabric business lies in service efficiency. Designers often carry scraps of sample fabric seeking similar materials; manual matching against color cards is time-consuming, and remote communication is inefficient. Haoli participated in the AI-Bu mini-program digital fabric construction, digitizing core fabrics such as waffle, health knit, double-faced jersey, mesh, air layer, and pique, enabling one-click matching of identical or similar fabrics. This tool's value for high-end clients: rapid response to sample requests, improved matching accuracy, and shortened decision cycles. For the industry, fabric digitization is shifting from optional to essential—especially as remote trade becomes the norm, digital capability directly determines service radius.
Supply Chain Synergy: Scale Effects of Shared Resources
The synergy between Haoli and Qiting extends beyond complementary brand positioning to supply chain sharing. A 15,000-square-meter warehouse, dual stock-and-custom modes, and fastest one-hour shipping are enabled by an integrated mill. The outdoor fabric production line uses Italian imported napping equipment to expand capacity; foreign trade targets Europe and America, meeting EU standards for fluorine-free environmental protection. Long-term domestic collaborations include Qiaodun (8-10 years), Xiaobeibei, Yingqi, and others, with bidirectional traffic opening high-end menswear channels for Haoli. This synergy means: small-batch urgent orders can be delivered quickly, custom orders within 3-10 days, balancing flexibility and scale.
Trend Judgment: A Viable Path for High-End Transformation
From the East Market school uniform storefront to Phase I of Dongsheng Road for outdoor functional fabrics, and then Phase II for the independent Haoli brand, Qiting's trajectory reveals a clear upgrade path: leveraging existing supply chain foundations to extend into niche high-end segments, using craftsmanship and digitization to build differentiation. Dongsheng Road concentrates quality brands, e-commerce merchants, and designers, yielding better order conversion—ideal soil for transformation. For fabric merchants in Keqiao and beyond, this case demonstrates that high-end transformation is not an airy concept but a gradual leap based on accumulated strengths.