Keqiao, a strong economic district "supported by cloth," set the tone for the home textile fabric industry in 2026 with a set of data: in 2025, the China Textile City's turnover exceeded 440 billion yuan, with nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises, an annual output value approaching 70 billion yuan, and cross-border online transactions reaching 800-900 million US dollars. Behind these figures lies a real shift from "scale expansion" to "value growth." On August 12, the annual meeting of the China Home Textile Association Fabric Branch was held here, with the theme "Design Breakthrough, Technology Empowerment, Omni-channel Symbiosis" pointing directly to the way out of the industry's stock involution.
Event Background
The timing of the annual meeting is significant. In the first year of the "15th Five-Year Plan," the textile industry saw steady growth in production, sales, and exports in the first half of the year, but pressures such as weak demand and trade fluctuations persisted. Zhu Xiaohong, president of the China Home Textile Association, reviewed the achievements of the "14th Five-Year Plan": the industry scale is stable, and the science and technology standard system is improved, but the fabric industry has been impacted by the real estate downturn and rising raw material prices, putting pressure on corporate profits, with exports showing a trend of rising volume but falling prices. This means that the past growth path relying on scale has hit a ceiling.
As a representative of the curtain fabric industry cluster, Keqiao's nearly 8,000 enterprises are both an advantage and a challenge. Sun Weigang, deputy secretary of the Party Working Committee of China Textile City, emphasized in his speech that Keqiao is focusing on the goal of building a "modern international textile capital" and promoting the industry's advancement toward high-end, digital, fashionable, branded, and internationalized development. This five-direction approach is actually a concrete breakdown of the connotation of "value growth"—from manufacturing thinking to brand thinking, from single-product manufacturing to overall soft decoration solution service providers.
Industrial Impact
Design breakthrough is placed at the top, behind which lies the pain of homogeneous competition. Lin Shaowu, brand consultant of Tianyu New Materials, pointed out directly: price involution and product homogenization, and the key to breaking through is to return to users' real home scenarios. Focusing on new demands such as 300 million people with sleep disorders, separate bedding for couples, and home office, combining temperature control, antibacterial and other functions with healing colors, and building a product matrix of image products, profit products, and traffic products—this approach means that original design is no longer an ornament but the cornerstone of brand bargaining power.
Technology empowerment provides support from the technical end. The digital and functional technologies brought by Donghua University associate professor Ji Feng, such as AI-based intelligent precise color matching and CNN deep learning fiber identification, are replacing traditional chemical testing, reducing R&D and quality control costs. The industrialization of functional fabric processes such as phase-change temperature control and nano-modification turns healthy sleep from a marketing concept into verifiable physical functions, which is the key path to increasing the added value of home textile products.
AI and going global are the most incrementally imaginative sectors of this annual meeting. Zhao Lu, global VP of Collov AI, proposed that spatial AI is the key to improving efficiency in the fabric industry—through world models to achieve spatial analysis, material replacement, and one-click realistic scene generation, saving hundreds of thousands of yuan in offline sample sending and real shooting. Commercial soft decoration is listed as the priority landing track, and AI standardized solutions can significantly improve engineering bidding competitiveness. For small and medium-sized factories, this means that digital capabilities that only large enterprises could afford in the past now have a lightweight entry point.
On the going-global front, the TikTok platform 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. The sharing by Modeng Media of immersive short videos, local influencers, and Keqiao industrial belt traceability live streaming provides replicable cross-border operation plans for factories and brands. Combined with Keqiao's cross-border online transaction volume of 800-900 million US dollars, it is not difficult to see that globalization is extending from an exclusive track for head enterprises to a growth channel for small and medium-sized enterprises.