How big can an industry built on curtain fabric get? Keqiao, Shaoxing, offers a concrete answer: nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises, annual output approaching 70 billion yuan, and cross-border online transactions reaching 800-900 million USD. These figures surfaced at the 2026 China Home Textile Association Fabric Branch annual meeting held on August 12. While the industry faces pressure from a declining real estate sector and rising raw material costs, this cluster maintains considerable scale—a sample worth dissecting.
Background
The meeting, themed "Design Breakthrough, Tech Empowerment, Omni-channel Symbiosis," placed original design, AI digitalization, healthy sleep, and global channels side by side. Liang Pengcheng, Vice President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, noted that this year marks the start of the 15th Five-Year Plan, with output, sales, and exports growing steadily in the first half, yet weak demand and trade fluctuations remain. Zhu Xiaohong, President of the China Home Textile Association, reviewed the achievements of the 14th Five-Year Plan while pointing out that profits in the fabric sector were under pressure in the first half, with exports showing volume growth but price decline.
Combining these two messages reveals a clearer signal: Keqiao's scale advantage persists, but the industry has entered a critical phase of shifting from scale expansion to value growth. Among the six tasks Zhu outlined, perfecting a global diversified supply chain, tapping domestic soft furnishing renewal demand, and activating new productive forces through AI and industry-academia-research integration were highlighted. This implies that competition in home textiles during the 15th Five-Year Plan will no longer be about sheer output but about design, technology, and channel efficiency.
Industry Impact
For buyers and factories, the most noteworthy aspect is the specific pace of AI technology moving from labs to production lines. Ji Feng, Associate Professor at Donghua University, showcased two achievements ready for application: AI-based intelligent color matching to solve digital printing color difference, and CNN deep learning for non-destructive fabric composition identification, replacing traditional chemical testing. If these technologies become widespread, they will directly shorten sampling cycles and reduce testing costs, especially attractive to SMEs.
Another frequently mentioned keyword is "spatial AI." In the fabric industry, sampling, real-scene shooting, and scene expression have always been major hidden costs. AI world models can achieve spatial analysis, material replacement, and one-click real-scene generation, saving costs on offline sampling and photo shoots. According to the meeting, commercial soft furnishing is seen as the priority landing track because AI standardized solutions can significantly enhance bidding competitiveness. However, embodied intelligence still needs time; in the next three years, applications will mainly focus on warehousing, sorting, and inspection.
For exporters, cross-border e-commerce platform data offers a new growth reference. 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. This means SMEs that relied on traditional foreign trade orders can now reach overseas consumers directly through short videos and local influencers. But going global is not simply opening a store; it requires building a three-tier product matrix of image, profit, and traffic products, coupled with immersive content operations.