While curtain fabric companies are still anxious about price wars, an industry annual meeting offered a different solution: replace physical photo shoots with spatial intelligence, rebuild pricing power with original design, and open a second growth curve through cross-border platforms. On August 12, the 2026 China Home Textile Association Fabric Branch Annual Meeting was held in Keqiao, Shaoxing. The signal was clear—the next round of competition in home textiles will not be about capacity or price, but a comprehensive contest of design, technology, and globalization capabilities.
Event Background
Keqiao, described as an 'economic powerhouse on a piece of cloth,' demonstrated the industrial depth of home textiles with data. In 2025, China Light Textile City's transaction volume exceeded 440 billion yuan, with nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises, an annual output value of nearly 70 billion yuan, and cross-border online transactions of 800-900 million USD. Behind these numbers lies a complete textile industry chain and a huge cluster of SMEs. However, the industrial scale advantage has not fully translated into profit advantage. Liang Pengcheng, Vice President of China National Textile and Apparel Council, revealed that in the first half of the year, production, sales, and exports increased steadily, but weak demand and trade fluctuations remained. Zhu Xiaohong, President of China Home Textile Association, was more direct: due to the downturn in real estate and rising raw material prices, corporate profits were under pressure, and exports showed a trend of volume growth with price declines.
This means that the old model of scale expansion and low-price volume has peaked. The industry is at a critical juncture of transforming from 'manufacturing thinking' to 'brand thinking' and from 'single product manufacturing' to 'overall soft furnishing solutions.' Zhu Xiaohong's six major tasks for the '15th Five-Year Plan'—improving global diversified supply chains, tapping domestic soft furnishing renewal demand, activating new quality productive forces with AI and industry-academia-research integration, building Chinese home textile aesthetic independent brands, implementing full-chain carbon footprint standards, and establishing healthy sleep laboratories—are exactly the top-level design for this transformation. For buyers and factories, these directions indicate that product development, certification, and channel layout in the coming years should revolve around 'value growth' rather than 'scale expansion.'
Industrial Impact
Original design has been pushed to an unprecedented height. Lin Shaowu, brand consultant at Tianyu New Materials, pointed out that the core of breaking the deadlock is to return to real home scenarios of users, focusing on 300 million people with sleep disorders, separate duvets, and home office needs, combining temperature control and antibacterial functions with healing colors and layered textures, and building a product matrix of image products, profit products, and traffic products. This means the era of simply selling fabric is passing; suppliers that can provide overall soft furnishing lifestyle output will gain higher pricing power. For buyers, future product selection should not only consider material and price but also whether the design language is unified and can integrate with home scenarios.
AI technology is moving from concept to implementation. Ji Feng, Associate Professor at Donghua University, showcased textile digital and intelligent achievements: using a massive dye database and AI intelligent color matching to solve digital printing color differences; using CNN deep learning to non-destructively identify fabric composition, replacing traditional chemical testing. These technologies will directly reduce sampling and testing costs for enterprises and shorten development cycles. Zhao Lu, Global VP of Collov AI, brought a more cutting-edge 'spatial AI' solution: using world models to achieve spatial analysis, material replacement, and one-click real-scene generation, saving high costs of offline sampling and actual shooting; commercial soft furnishing is seen as the priority landing track, where AI standardized solutions can enhance engineering bid competitiveness. He judged that embodied intelligence will only be applied on a large scale in warehousing, sorting, and inspection processes in the next three years, but enterprises that first deploy spatial intelligence will reshape the industry landscape.
Overseas channels are transforming from a track exclusive to leading enterprises to a growth channel for SMEs. Zhang Xiaocun, partner at Modeng Media's home textile business, shared practical data from the TikTok platform: covering over 150 countries with 2 billion monthly active users, with home furnishing categories in Southeast Asia and Latin America leading global growth. He suggested using immersive short videos, local influencers, and Keqiao industrial belt origin live streaming, combined with a three-tier product matrix of basic, functional, and co-branded products, to open up overseas blue ocean markets. For small and medium factories, this means cross-border e-commerce is no longer an unattainable option but a realistic path that can be quickly entered through platform traffic dividends and industrial belt collaboration. However, the current situation of export volume growth with price decline also reminds enterprises that simply going overseas with low prices is unsustainable and must combine design and technology to form differentiated competitiveness.