While curtain fabric companies are still anxious about price wars, Keqiao offers a different picture with a set of numbers: in 2025, the China Textile City's turnover exceeded 440 billion yuan, with nearly 8,000 local curtain fabric enterprises, an annual output value of nearly 70 billion yuan, and cross-border online transactions of 800-900 million USD. The 2026 China Home Textile Association Fabric Branch Annual Meeting was recently held in Shaoxing Keqiao. The forum, themed "Design Breakthrough, Technology Empowerment, Global Symbiosis – New Quality Growth for Fabric Soft Furnishings," did not stop at industry pleasantries but confronted a core question: in a stock market, how can fabric enterprises survive and thrive?
Event Background
The choice of Keqiao was not accidental. As an "economic powerhouse carried by a piece of cloth," Keqiao boasts a complete textile industry chain from raw materials to finished products. The scale and transformation speed of its curtain fabric cluster serve as a national bellwether. Liang Pengcheng, Vice President of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, revealed in his speech that in this 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 loom large. Home textiles are close to people's livelihoods and still hold potential; the key is converting that potential into growth.
Zhu Xiaohong, President of the China Home Textile Association, reviewed the achievements of the 14th Five-Year Plan, noting that industrial scale stabilized, the science and technology standard system improved, and original design and branding accelerated. However, the fabric industry has been hit by the real estate downturn and rising raw material costs, with corporate profits under pressure in the first half of the year and exports showing a trend of volume growth with price decline. This means the old growth model of scale expansion is no longer viable; the industry must find new value anchors.
Industrial Impact
Several guest speeches at the forum pointed directly at industry pain points and offered actionable solutions. Lin Shaowu, brand consultant for Tianyu New Materials, was sharp in his observation: the root of price involution and product homogenization is that companies have detached from real user home scenarios. He proposed returning to original design, focusing on new demands such as 300 million people with sleep disorders, split-bed sleeping, and home offices, combining temperature control, antibacterial functions with healing colors and layered textures, and building a product matrix of image, profit, and traffic models. The logic is that when products upgrade from "a piece of cloth" to "a lifestyle," a company's pricing power and brand barriers can be established.
Breakthroughs on the technology front are equally noteworthy. Ji Feng, Associate Professor at Donghua University, showcased AI applications in textiles: using massive dye databases and AI intelligent color matching to solve digital printing color difference issues; using fiber polarization image libraries and CNN deep learning for non-destructive rapid identification of fabric composition, replacing traditional chemical testing. What does this mean for curtain companies? Shorter sampling cycles, lower quality inspection costs, and more importantly, the industrialization threshold for functional fabrics such as phase-change temperature control and nano-modification is lowering, allowing small and medium enterprises to access technological dividends that were previously exclusive to leading companies.
Overseas expansion is another incremental space repeatedly mentioned. Zhang Xiaocun, partner at Modeng Media's home textile business, used TikTok data to illustrate opportunities: the 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. But he emphasized that going overseas is not simply listing products on cross-border stores; it requires immersive short videos, local influencers, and Keqiao industrial belt traceability livestreams, paired with a product matrix of basic, functional, and co-branded models. For Keqiao enterprises, the industrial belt itself is content material, an advantage that other regions cannot easily replicate.
Practical Recommendations
For Buyers - Prioritize suppliers with functional fabric technologies: choose companies with patented temperature control or antibacterial features and test reports; such products have higher premium potential and avoid homogenized competition. - Leverage AI sampling tools: collaborate with factories that have adopted intelligent color matching and virtual scene generation to significantly shorten sample confirmation cycles and reduce communication costs. - Plan cross-border product selection: for Southeast Asian and Latin American markets, focus on suppliers capable of small-batch, quick-response production and localized content marketing support.
For Foreign Trade Enterprises - Build a fabric physical database: digitize fabric composition, color fastness, and functional parameters; this is a foundational asset for future AI applications and customer trust. - Try TikTok industrial belt livestreaming: use Keqiao factory scenes for traceability livestreams, combined with local influencer-edited short videos, which convert better than plain image-text listings. - Design a three-tier product matrix: use basic models for volume, functional models for reputation, and co-branded models for brand enhancement, avoiding single-dimensional price competition.
The signals from the Keqiao annual meeting are clear: the stock game in home textile fabrics is not a zero-sum game but a race to shift from selling cloth to selling solutions. Design, technology, and overseas expansion all point in the same direction—using differentiated value to counter involution. For enterprises and buyers, now is the time to re-evaluate their positioning.