While curtain fabric enterprises are still agonizing over a few cents per meter, leading clusters have already drawn a new track with a set of data: Keqiao Light Textile City's annual transaction volume exceeded 440 billion yuan, and nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises produced nearly 70 billion yuan in annual output. This was public data disclosed at the China Home Textile Association Fabric Branch annual meeting on August 12, meaning the competition logic in home textile fabrics is shifting from 'volume competition' to 'system competition.'
Event Background
The annual meeting, held in Keqiao, Shaoxing, was themed 'Design Breakthrough, Technology Empowerment, and Omni-Channel Symbiosis,' but more noteworthy was the judgment on the start of the '15th Five-Year Plan.' Liang Pengcheng, Vice President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, noted that production, sales, and exports grew steadily in the first half of the year, but weak demand and trade fluctuations remained. In other words, the industry has not stalled, but the quality of growth is being redefined.
Zhu Xiaohong, President of the China Home Textile Association, provided more granularity in reviewing the '14th Five-Year Plan': industrial scale was stable, and the science and technology standard system improved, but the fabric industry was hit by real estate downturn and raw material price increases, squeezing corporate profits in the first half and showing a trend of volume-up-price-down in exports. This contrast points to a core contradiction: scale remains, but profits are gone. For small and medium factories that rely on volume, this may be a more dangerous signal than order declines.
Industrial Impact
The annual meeting broke down the breakthrough path into four lines: original design, technology integration, AI empowerment, and global channels. These lines are not isolated but revolve around a common goal—upgrading home textiles from 'a piece of fabric' to 'a solution.' Tianyu New Materials' proposed product matrix of 'image products, profit products, and traffic products' essentially converts design capability into pricing power; Donghua University's AI intelligent color matching and fiber polarization image library mean that hidden costs like inspection and sampling may be significantly reduced.
For buyers, these changes directly affect supply chain choices. The traditional process of viewing samples, comparing prices, and verifying components may be replaced by AI-generated real-time visuals and online identification, reducing communication costs and forcing factories to provide more standardized product data. For factories, Collov AI's 'spatial AI' is worth noting—it can cut real-shot and sample mailing costs by hundreds of thousands of yuan, meaning factories relying on traditional display methods may lose advantages in bidding and customer acquisition.
The export sector sends a clear signal. TikTok covers over 150 countries with 2 billion monthly active users, and home furnishing categories in Southeast Asia and Latin America lead global growth. For clusters like Keqiao with a complete industrial chain, cross-border live streaming and industrial belt traceability are no longer concepts but replicable tactics. However, the volume-up-price-down export trend indicates that the old path of low-price going global has reached its end; the three-tier product matrix (basic, functional, co-branded) on platforms is where profits lie.
Practical Recommendations
For Buyers - Incorporate AI-assisted product selection into supplier evaluation, prioritizing factories that can provide digital fabric data to shorten sampling cycles. - Focus on functional fabrics such as health sleep and temperature control in curtains and bedding; these products have higher premium potential and align with consumption upgrades. - Use cross-border platform data for reverse product selection; high-growth categories in Southeast Asia and Latin America can serve as differentiated procurement entry points.
For Foreign Trade Enterprises - When deploying TikTok and other short-video channels, replace traditional product images with immersive scenario videos and collaborate with local influencers to reduce acquisition costs. - Establish a product matrix of 'basic products for volume, functional products for profit, and co-branded products for branding' to avoid low-price competition. - Prepare fabric physical data in advance to prepare for future integration with spatial AI and intelligent inspection, which will become a new competitive barrier.
The core judgment from the Keqiao annual meeting is that the 'scale expansion' narrative in home textile fabrics has ended; the future belongs to enterprises that can twist design, technology, data, and global channels into one rope. For every role in the industry chain, this is not a choice but a survival issue.