While curtain fabric companies still compete for orders by shaving a few cents per meter, Keqiao's industrial belt has already revealed a different set of assets: in 2025, the China Light Textile City's turnover exceeded 440 billion yuan, curtain fabric output reached nearly 70 billion yuan, and cross-border online trade hit 800-900 million USD. Behind these figures lies a systemic shift from scale expansion to value growth—a roadmap drawn at the 2026 annual meeting of the China Home Textile Association's Fabric Branch, held on August 12.
Background
The choice of Keqiao as the venue was no accident. Known as an economic powerhouse 'supported by a piece of cloth,' Keqiao boasts a complete textile chain from raw materials to finished products, with nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises forming one of the densest clusters in China. But the scale advantage is hitting a ceiling: while production, sales, and exports grew steadily in the first half, weak demand and trade volatility continue to suppress profit margins, with exports showing rising volume but falling prices.
Liang Pengcheng, vice president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, said bluntly that this year marks the start of the 15th Five-Year Plan, and new quality productivity is not optional but a matter of survival. Zhu Xiaohong, president of the China Home Textile Association, reviewed the achievements of the 14th Five-Year Plan, noting that while industrial scale and standards have improved, real estate downturn and rising raw material costs have squeezed profits. The industry must shift from a manufacturing mindset to a brand mindset, and from single-product sales to whole-home soft furnishing solutions.
Industry Impact
The strongest signal from the meeting is that technology is reshaping the competitive dimensions of home textiles. Donghua University associate professor Ji Feng presented digital achievements worth noting: AI-based smart color matching using vast dye databases solves long-standing color difference issues in digital printing, while CNN deep learning on fiber polarization image libraries enables non-destructive, rapid fabric composition identification, replacing traditional chemical tests. For buyers, this means fabric verification cycles could shrink from weeks to days, making supply chain responsiveness a decisive factor in order allocation.
Another key variable is spatial AI. Zhao Lu, global VP of Collov AI, pointed out that the biggest hidden cost in the fabric industry lies in sampling, real-scene photography, and scene presentation—a showroom can cost hundreds of thousands of yuan. Spatial intelligence, using world models for material replacement and one-click scene generation, could reduce this cost by an order of magnitude. He also predicted that embodied intelligence would take three years to scale in warehousing, sorting, and inspection, but accumulating fabric physical data is an asset companies can start building immediately. This means that enterprises that establish digital fabric libraries early will gain a data moat in the next round of competition.
Overseas expansion is also undergoing structural change. Media data shared by Modeng Media shows that TikTok covers over 150 countries with 2 billion monthly active users, and home furnishing categories in Southeast Asia and Latin America are growing fastest globally. For Keqiao factories long dependent on traditional foreign trade orders, this is both an incremental entry point and an opportunity for brand reinvention—through immersive short videos, local influencer collaborations, and live-streaming from the industrial belt, SMEs can bypass middlemen and reach end consumers directly. But cross-border operations are not a simple channel shift; product portfolios need to be layered from basic, functional, to co-branded items to establish price anchors in different markets.
Practical Recommendations
For Buyers - Prioritize suppliers that have established digital fabric libraries and can provide AI-based color matching and composition reports to shorten inspection cycles. - Focus on companies offering functional fabrics (e.g., temperature control, antibacterial) and whole-home soft furnishing solutions to meet sleep economy and work-from-home demands. - In cross-border sourcing, use real-time data from platforms like TikTok to guide product design and avoid inventory buildup from blind order following.
For Foreign Trade Enterprises - Start digitizing fabric physical data now to build a proprietary database, preparing for spatial AI and cross-border platforms. - For Southeast Asian and Latin American markets, design a three-tier product matrix (basic, functional, co-branded) and pair it with localized short-video content. - Participate in industry association matchmaking events and leverage Keqiao's cluster resources for exhibitions and cross-border channels to reduce the cost of going global alone.
The annual meeting's value lies not in releasing new concepts but in clarifying the path from 'scale dividend' to 'value growth.' As AI begins to understand spatial aesthetics, and healthy sleep transforms from marketing rhetoric into fabric functionality, the rules of competition in home textiles have been rewritten. For practitioners in Keqiao and beyond, the real dividing line is not whether to embrace these technologies, but whether they can translate them into tangible products and efficiency. Those who move early are turning the industry's involution into their own moat.