While most Keqiao fabric merchants still compete on price in the conventional fabric red ocean, a dual-brand combo in the Dongsheng Road district has priced plant-dyed wool fabrics at 600 yuan per meter—several times the cost of typical school uniform fabrics—and still attracts premium menswear designers. Over a decade, this trajectory from school uniforms to light luxury reveals not just product upgrades but a fundamental restructuring of supply chain logic.
Background
Qiting, launched in 2013 and officially registered in 2014, started as a school uniform fabric store in the East Market. Solid quality control built a stable customer base and mature supply chain, but intensifying competition and shrinking margins on conventional fabrics in 2018 forced a strategic pivot: one track focused on functional outdoor fabrics, while a new brand, Haoli Textiles, targeted premium menswear. This dual-track timing aligned with simultaneous growth in outdoor sports and affordable luxury consumption.
The Dongsheng Road area, Keqiao's specialized outdoor fabric district, attracts brand owners, e-commerce merchants, and fashion designers. Haoli's general manager Li Xiongzhen notes that customers here demand finer fabrics and yields higher order conversion. Location itself becomes precise customer filtering—rather than searching in a general market, this district enables direct engagement with high-intent buyers.
Industry Impact
Haoli's product strategy is representative: using purely natural fibers like wool, silk, and lyocell, colored via plant extraction rather than chemical dyes, with prices locked in the 100-600 yuan range. This approach sidesteps low-end price wars but imposes higher demands on the supply chain. Natural materials and special processes mean longer lead times and higher costs, forcing efficiency to balance the equation.
Supply chain efficiency is the core competency. Sharing 15,000 square meters of warehousing, the spot model handles small urgent orders, while custom orders are controlled within 3-10 days, and complete inventory enables 1-hour dispatch. For premium menswear designers and brand buyers, this means significantly shorter sampling and replenishment cycles, reducing inventory risk. The integrated factory ensures stable quality and cost control.
Digitalization is another lever. Haoli has digitized core fabrics like waffle, health jersey, double-face plain, mesh, air layer, and pique into the AI Bu mini-program, enabling one-click matching of similar fabrics. Previously, manual swatch flipping and color card comparison were inefficient, and remote communication with overseas clients was time-consuming. Now the system quickly retrieves matches with higher accuracy, especially for clients demanding precise hand-feel and texture. This transforms traditional experience-based matching into data-driven matching, giving non-standard fabric trading a standardized entry point.
The dual-brand synergy is showing results. The outdoor fabric line uses Italian-imported napping equipment, boosting capacity and improving bargaining power and production speed. Export channels target Europe and America, meeting EU standards for fluorine-free environmental protection. Domestically, long-term cooperation with Qiaodun (8-10 years) and clients like Xiaobeibei, Yingqi, Macedonia, and Xiaozhubanna provides resource cross-flow for the premium menswear business. Two years into the transformation, overall performance has improved significantly, and order growth suggests continued potential this year.
For buyers, this dual-brand model offers a more flexible and reliable supply option: functional outdoor fabrics from Qiting and plant-dyed premium menswear fabrics from Haoli, sharing warehousing and logistics, reducing multi-supplier management complexity. For factories, digital archiving and AI matching are not optional but essential tools for serving high-end clients, otherwise struggling to handle fragmented, demanding orders.