When Keqiao Textile City's annual transaction volume exceeded 440 billion yuan and curtain fabric enterprises approached 8,000, the home textile fabric industry felt the chill on the profit side. In the first half of the year, export volumes rose but prices fell, and the real estate downturn dragged domestic demand. The traditional scale-expansion model has hit its ceiling. The 2026 China Home Textile Association Fabric Branch annual meeting held in Keqiao, Shaoxing on August 12 sent a clear signal: the industry is shifting from "scale expansion" to "value growth," and new quality productivity is no longer an option but a matter of survival.
Event Background
The annual meeting, themed "Design Breakthrough, Technology Empowerment, and Omni-channel Coexistence," gathered industry associations, university experts, brand companies, and cross-border e-commerce platforms to address the full chain of creativity, technology, and market. Liang Pengcheng, Vice President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, noted in his speech that production, sales, and exports grew steadily in the first half, but weak demand and trade fluctuations persist. He proposed three paths: technology empowerment, green upgrading, and consumption insight—essentially using digital transformation to cultivate new quality productivity, building competitive barriers through health and safety, and reshaping the market map with consumption trends.
Zhu Xiaohong, President of the China Home Textile Association (CHTA), reviewed the achievements of the 14th Five-Year Plan: stable industrial scale, accelerated original design and brand building, but also pointed out that the fabric industry suffered from real estate downturn and raw material price hikes, squeezing corporate profits, with exports showing volume growth but price decline. She proposed six goals for the 15th Five-Year Plan, including improving global supply chains, tapping domestic soft furnishing renewal demand, integrating AI with industry-university-research, building Chinese home textile aesthetic brands, implementing full-chain carbon footprint standards, and establishing healthy sleep laboratories. These goals directly target the transformation from manufacturing mindset to brand mindset, and from single-product manufacturing to overall soft furnishing solutions.
Industry Impact
Keqiao, as a sample of the curtain fabric industry cluster, reveals the urgency of transformation through its data. In 2025, the textile city's transaction volume exceeded 440 billion yuan, with nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises and an annual output value of nearly 70 billion yuan, with cross-border online transactions reaching 800-900 million US dollars. However, scale advantages have not translated into profit advantages; homogenized price wars and high hidden costs are common pain points. In response, Lin Shaowu, brand consultant at Tianyu New Materials, proposed returning to original design, focusing on new demands such as the 300 million people with sleep disorders and separate duvets, building a product matrix of image, profit, and traffic models to establish brand recognition and pricing power. This means enterprises must shift from selling fabric to selling lifestyle solutions.
On the technology front, Ji Feng, Associate Professor at Donghua University, showcased AI applications in textile digitalization, such as massive dye databases enabling intelligent color matching to solve digital printing color differences, and fiber polarization image libraries with CNN deep learning to quickly identify fabric composition, replacing traditional chemical testing. If these technologies are implemented, they will significantly reduce sampling and testing costs, especially benefiting SMEs. Meanwhile, Zhao Lu, Global VP of Collov AI, proposed that spatial AI is key to improving fabric industry efficiency. By using world models for spatial analysis and material replacement, companies can save on offline sampling and photoshoot costs, with commercial soft furnishing as the priority landing track. He noted that embodied intelligence will only be scalable in warehousing, sorting, and inspection processes in the next three years, but companies that adopt spatial AI early will reshape the competitive landscape.
On the export front, Zhang Xiaocun, partner at Modeng Media, cited TikTok data: the platform covers over 150 countries with 2 billion monthly active users, with Southeast Asia and Latin America leading global growth in home categories. He recommended using immersive short videos, local influencers, and Keqiao industry belt traceability live streams to open incremental markets, and building a three-tier product matrix of basic, functional, and co-branded products. For SMEs, cross-border platforms lower the barrier to globalization, but require matching digital capabilities and localized operations.