When curtain fabric companies see their profit margins squeezed by the real estate downturn and rising raw material costs, while exports fall into a pattern of rising volume but falling prices, the industry's actual experience feels colder than the macro data suggests. The 2026 Annual Meeting of the Home Textile Association's Fabric Branch, held on August 12 in Keqiao, Shaoxing, sent a contrary signal: the industry is at a tipping point from scale expansion to value growth, and new quality productive forces are not an option but a matter of survival.
Background
Keqiao explained why the meeting was held here. In 2025, the 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 reaching 800-900 million USD. This cluster, often called an 'economic powerhouse carried on a piece of cloth,' already has a complete textile industry chain and is advancing toward high-end, digital, fashionable, branded, and international development.
Liang Pengcheng, Vice President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, outlined the industry's first half: production, sales, and exports grew steadily, but pressures from weak demand and trade fluctuations persisted. Zhu Xiaohong, President of the China Home Textile Association, reviewed the achievements of the 14th Five-Year Plan but pointed out the crux: the fabric industry suffered from the real estate downturn and rising raw material costs, squeezing corporate profits, with exports showing a trend of rising volume but falling prices. This means the old model of relying on scale for profits has reached its limit, and the industry needs a new value framework.
Industry Impact
The meeting broke down the path forward into four dimensions: design, technology, AI, and overseas expansion, each targeting specific cost pain points and efficiency bottlenecks. Original design is redefined as the core weapon against homogenization, but its implementation is no longer just aesthetic expression—it returns to real user home scenarios, focusing on 300 million people with sleep disorders, separate bedding, and home office needs, combining temperature control and antibacterial functions with healing colors and layered textures, building a product matrix of image, profit, and traffic items. This shift from single-product sales to whole-home soft furnishing lifestyle output means companies must reconfigure design resources and supply chain capabilities.
AI technology's path to implementation is more pragmatic than imagined. Associate Professor Ji Feng from Donghua University demonstrated intelligent precise color matching using a massive dye database to solve digital printing color difference issues; a fiber polarization image library based on CNN deep learning can non-destructively and quickly identify fabric composition, replacing traditional chemical testing. These technologies are not lab concepts but can directly reduce sampling costs and testing cycles. Collov AI's spatial AI solution addresses the high costs of real-scene photography and scene expression in the fabric industry, using world models to achieve spatial analysis, material replacement, and one-click real-scene generation, saving hundreds of thousands of yuan in offline sampling and photography. For buyers and factories, this means that within the next three years, warehousing, sorting, and inspection processes may see large-scale AI applications first, and fabric physical data will become a long-term core asset.
The overseas channel offers incremental space for SMEs. TikTok covers over 150 countries with 2 billion monthly active users, and home furnishing categories in Southeast Asia and Latin America grow faster than the global average. Tactics like immersive short videos, local influencers, and Keqiao industrial belt live-streaming provide replicable cross-border operation plans for fabric factories and brands. But going overseas is not simply listing products on cross-border platforms; it requires building a three-tier product matrix of basic, functional, and co-branded items, coupled with localized content strategies. This means foreign trade enterprises must rethink channel logic, shifting from order-based production to brand operations.