When the annual output value of curtain fabrics approaches 70 billion yuan while corporate profits are squeezed by rising raw material costs and a downturn in real estate, China's home textile fabric industry stands at a crossroads. On August 12, the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Home Textile Association's Fabric Branch was held in Keqiao, Shaoxing, releasing a set of data and judgments that should prompt every practitioner to re-examine their growth logic.
Industry Landscape: Keqiao Sample and Sector Pressures
Sun Weigang, Deputy Secretary of the Party Working Committee of China Textile City, provided key figures: in 2025, the textile city's turnover exceeded 440 billion yuan, with nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises, an annual output value of nearly 70 billion yuan, and cross-border online transactions reaching 800-900 million US dollars. This means Keqiao alone rivals the entire home textile industry of many countries. On the flip side, Zhu Xiaohong, President of the China Home Textile Association, admitted during a review of the 14th Five-Year Plan that the fabric sector suffered from real estate downturn and rising raw material costs, squeezing corporate profits in the first half of the year, with exports showing volume growth but price decline.
These two sets of information paint a typical picture of being "big but not strong": scale advantages remain, but unit value is shrinking; order volumes haven't disappeared, but profits are squeezed by costs and exchange rates. For buyers, this means the crude model of "quoting per meter and shipping by ton" is failing, requiring more precise calculation of total costs and quality premiums.
Transformation Paths: Design, Technology, and AI Breakthroughs
Facing homogeneity price wars, Lin Shaowu, brand consultant of Tianyu New Materials, proposed returning to users' real home scenarios, focusing on 300 million people with sleep disorders, separate duvets, and work-from-home needs, combining temperature control and antibacterial functions with healing colors and layered textures. He advocates building a product matrix of image, profit, and traffic items to shift from single-product sales to whole-house soft furnishing lifestyle output, using unified design language to build brand recognition and pricing power.
On the technology front, Associate Professor Ji Feng from Donghua University demonstrated the practical application of textile digitalization: AI-based color matching to solve digital printing color differences, and CNN deep learning for non-destructive fabric composition identification, replacing traditional chemical tests. These technologies directly target production efficiency and cost optimization. For factories, this means faster, more environmentally friendly testing and significantly lower sampling costs.
AI's application in the fabric industry is even more imaginative. Zhao Lu, Global VP of Collov AI, pointed out that sampling, real-scene photography, and scene expression are the most costly aspects of the fabric industry. Spatial AI can achieve space parsing, material replacement, and one-click real-scene generation through world models, saving high costs of offline sampling and photography. He emphasized that fabric physical data will become a long-term core asset for enterprises, and companies that adopt spatial intelligence first will reshape the competitive landscape. This is particularly important for SMEs—the effect images and scenario marketing that only big brands could afford may now be leveled by AI.
New Export Channels: Combining Traffic Dividends with Industrial Cluster Advantages
Zhang Xiaocun of Modern Media cited TikTok data, noting the platform covers over 150 countries with 2 billion monthly active users, and home furnishing categories in Southeast Asia and Latin America are growing faster than the global average. He shared tactics like immersive short videos, local influencers, and Keqiao industrial belt traceability livestreams. For Keqiao companies long reliant on traditional foreign trade orders, this means a new incremental logic: not waiting for customers to come, but directly reaching end consumers through content, then pulling B2B procurement in reverse.
But going global has thresholds. Zhang emphasized the need for a three-tier product matrix of basic, functional, and co-branded items, testing product organization and supply chain responsiveness. For small and medium factories, rather than blindly following the trend of opening stores, it's wiser to leverage the industrial belt's flexible supply capacity to provide small-batch, quick-response supply services to cross-border sellers, gradually building their own brand presence.