When curtain fabrics evolve from "a piece of cloth" to "a spatial solution," the competitive logic of China's home textile industry is being rewritten. On August 12, the 2026 China Home Textile Association Fabric Branch annual meeting was held in Keqiao, Shaoxing, themed "Design Breakthrough, Technology Empowerment, Global Symbiosis." The event sent a clear signal: the old script of scale expansion is over, and value growth is the passport to the 15th Five-Year Plan period.
Event Background
Keqiao proved its weight in the industrial chain with data. In 2025, the China Light Textile City's transaction volume exceeded 440 billion yuan, with nearly 8,000 curtain and fabric enterprises and an annual output value of about 70 billion yuan. Cross-border online transactions reached 800 to 900 million US dollars. Behind these numbers lies the support of a complete industrial chain in this "economic powerhouse on a piece of cloth," and the confidence to shift from manufacturing thinking to brand thinking.
Zhu Xiaohong, president of the China Home Textile Association, reviewed the 14th Five-Year Plan period, noting that despite stable industrial scale and accelerated original design and brand building, declining real estate and rising raw material costs are squeezing corporate profits, with exports showing a trend of volume increase but price decrease. This means that relying solely on capacity and low prices to compete has reached its limit; enterprises must find new leverage in product added value.
Industry Impact
AI and functional fabrics became the hottest keywords at the meeting. A team from Donghua University showcased a CNN-based fiber polarization image library that enables non-destructive rapid identification of fabric composition, replacing traditional chemical testing. Meanwhile, phase-change temperature control and nano-modification processes are accelerating their transformation to curtain and bedding enterprises. For buyers, this means fabric testing will shift from "sending samples and waiting for reports" to "on-site immediate judgment," significantly improving supply chain response speed.
The implementation path for spatial intelligence is equally clear. Collov AI proposed that using world models can achieve spatial analysis, material replacement, and one-click realistic scene generation, saving high costs of offline sampling and real shooting. Commercial soft furnishing is prioritized as a fast-track application, where AI standardized solutions can significantly enhance bidding competitiveness. It is predicted that within three years, warehousing, sorting, and inspection processes will see large-scale application of embodied intelligence, and fabric physical data will become the core invisible asset of enterprises.
Going global is now opening up to small and medium-sized enterprises. TikTok covers more than 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. The immersive short videos, local influencers, and live-streaming from the Keqiao industrial belt shared by Modern Media provide replicable cross-border operation strategies for factories and brands. This means globalization is no longer exclusive to leading enterprises; SMEs can leverage traffic dividends to tap into overseas blue oceans.
Practical Recommendations
For Buyers - Pay attention to intelligent upgrades in fabric testing technology, prioritizing suppliers with CNN rapid identification capabilities to shorten inspection cycles. - Integrate AI spatial design tools into the product selection process, using one-click realistic generation to reduce sampling and shooting costs. - Emphasize functional fabrics like temperature control and antibacterial properties in sleep scenarios, developing differentiated products for the 300 million people with sleep disorders.
For Foreign Trade Enterprises - Expand into high-growth markets in Southeast Asia and Latin America, leveraging traffic dividends on platforms like TikTok to build brand awareness through immersive short videos and local influencers. - Establish a three-tier product matrix: basic products for traffic, functional products for higher average order value, and co-branded products for brand building, avoiding a pure price war. - Digitize fabric physical data in advance to prepare for future integration with AI world models and intelligent warehousing systems.
This annual meeting is not the end but the starting point of transformation. The China Home Textile Association stated it will continue to collaborate with Keqiao China Light Textile City, regularly organizing industrial exchanges and docking activities. For practitioners, rather than dwelling on the involution of the existing market, it is wiser to proactively embrace the triple variables of design, technology, and globalization—after all, new quality productivity is not an option but a matter of survival.