While curtain fabric companies are still debating whether to cut prices by two cents or raise them by five, Keqiao offers a different answer with a set of numbers: in 2025, the Light 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, plus cross-border online transactions of 800-900 million US dollars. Behind these figures lies a deep signal: the home textile fabric industry is shifting from 'winning by volume' to 'standing by value.' On August 12, the 2026 Annual Meeting of the China Home Textile Association's Fabric Branch was held in Shaoxing Keqiao, and its theme, 'Design Breakthrough, Tech Empowerment, Ecosystem Synergy,' directly points to the core issue for the 15th Five-Year Plan period: how to rebuild growth logic through design, technology, and channels.
Event Background
The inventory involution in home textile fabrics is nothing new, but this year's first-half data made the pressure more concrete: exports showed volume growth with price declines, profits remained under pressure, and the dual squeeze of real estate downturn and rising raw material costs persisted. Liang Pengcheng, Vice President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, acknowledged in his speech that while production, sales, and exports have grown steadily, weak demand and trade fluctuations remain the norm. This means the days of relying on scale expansion to share the pie are over; enterprises must find new fulcrums for 'value growth.'
Zhu Xiaohong, President of the China Home Textile Association, reviewed the achievements of the 14th Five-Year Plan, noting stable industrial scale, improved scientific and technological standards, and accelerated original design and brand building. However, the fabric industry has been significantly impacted by the real estate downturn. She proposed six major tasks for the 15th Five-Year Plan, including improving the global diversified supply chain, tapping into domestic soft furnishing renewal demand, activating new quality productive forces through AI and industry-academia-research integration, building independent Chinese home textile aesthetics brands, implementing full-chain carbon footprint standards, and establishing health-sleep laboratories. These tasks are not empty slogans but directly address industry pain points: how to move AI from the lab to the production line, how to turn health-sleep from a marketing concept into fabric functionality, and how to extend globalization from a privilege of leading enterprises to a channel for SMEs.
Industry Impact
Keqiao, as an 'economic powerhouse supported by a piece of cloth,' deserves attention for its industrial belt response. Sun Weigang, Deputy Secretary of the Party Working Committee of China Light Textile City, outlined Keqiao's confidence with '440 billion yuan in transaction volume and 70 billion yuan in curtain fabric output value,' and made clear the push toward high-end, digital, fashionable, branded, and international development. For buyers, this means Keqiao has evolved from a fabric distribution center to a source of overall soft furnishing solutions. For factories, the agglomeration of nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises enables technology sharing and supply chain synergy, but also makes differentiation more urgent.
AI and functional fabrics were the most concrete landing points at the meeting. Tianyu New Materials proposed returning to real user home scenarios, focusing on 300 million people with sleep disorders, separate-bed sleep, and home office needs, combining temperature control and antibacterial functions with healing colors, and building a product matrix of image, profit, and traffic models. Professor Ji Feng from Donghua University showcased industry-academia-research achievements such as AI intelligent color matching and CNN deep learning fiber identification. Once industrialized, these technologies will directly reduce sampling costs and testing cycles. Zhao Lu from Collov AI stated bluntly that spatial AI is key to improving efficiency in the fabric industry. Through world models, spatial analysis, material replacement, and one-click realistic rendering, companies can save hundreds of thousands of yuan in physical sampling and photography. This means that enterprises that adopt spatial intelligence first will reshape the competitive landscape, and fabric physical data will become a long-term core asset.
Cross-border e-commerce opens another dimension of growth. 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. Modern Media shared replicable strategies such as immersive short videos, local influencers, and Keqiao industrial belt traceability livestreams. But going global is not simply about listing products; it requires a three-tier product matrix of basic, functional, and co-branded items, testing a company's product definition and supply chain responsiveness.