When the annual output value of curtain fabrics approaches 70 billion yuan and cross-border online transactions reach 800 to 900 million USD, Keqiao, the 'economic powerhouse on a piece of cloth,' once again becomes the industry focus. The 2026 China Home Textile Association Fabric Branch Annual Meeting sent a clear signal: the stock competition in home textile fabrics has entered deep water, and the era of relying solely on scale expansion is ending. Value reconstruction is the only way forward.
Industry Foundation: Scale and Hidden Worries
Keqiao Textile City's transaction volume exceeded 440 billion yuan in 2025, with nearly 8,000 curtain fabric enterprises and an annual output value of nearly 70 billion yuan, plus cross-border online transactions of 800-900 million USD. These figures outline a massive industrial belt, but beneath the surface lie pressures. Zhu Xiaohong, president of the China Home Textile Association, reviewed the '14th Five-Year Plan' achievements and pointed out that the fabric industry has been impacted by the real estate downturn and rising raw material costs, squeezing corporate profits in the first half of the year, with exports showing a trend of volume growth but price decline. This means that while order volumes are still growing, profit per meter of fabric is being compressed, and the vicious cycle of low-price involution has left many factories in an embarrassing 'increase production without increasing revenue' situation.
Breakthrough Paths: Design, AI, and Green Manufacturing
Facing the dilemma, the annual meeting set the theme 'Design Breakthrough, Technology Empowerment, Global Symbiosis,' attempting to break through from three dimensions. Original design is placed first. Lin Shaowu, brand consultant of Tianyu New Materials, directly addressed the pain points of price involution and product homogeneity, proposing a return to real user home scenarios, focusing on 300 million people with sleep disorders, separate-bed sleeping, and home office needs, combining temperature control and antibacterial functions with healing colors and layered textures to build a product matrix of image, profit, and traffic products. The logic behind this is that when the physical differences between fabrics shrink, design language and brand recognition become the moat for pricing power.
On the technology front, Ji Feng, associate professor at Donghua University's College of Textiles, brought practical technical sharing. By building a massive dye database, AI intelligent color matching solves the problem of digital printing color differences; based on a fiber polarization image library, CNN deep learning enables non-destructive rapid identification of fabric composition, replacing traditional chemical testing. These technologies may seem cutting-edge but directly address daily pain points of curtain enterprises—long sampling cycles, high testing costs, and frequent color disputes. For factories, whoever implements these technologies first will gain an edge in delivery efficiency and cost control.
AI applications extend beyond production. Zhao Lu, global VP of Collov AI, proposed that spatial AI is key to improving fabric industry efficiency. World models enable spatial analysis, material replacement, and one-click realistic scene generation, significantly reducing sampling and scene expression costs. He emphasized that fabric physical data is a long-term core asset for enterprises, and those who first deploy spatial intelligence will reshape the competitive landscape. This means that the future competitiveness of curtain enterprises may no longer depend on how many looms they have, but on how much data they accumulate that can be called by AI.
New Variables in Going Global: Traffic Dividends and Channel Reconstruction
Against the backdrop of weak domestic demand, going global has become another growth curve. Zhang Xiaocun, partner at Modern Media's home textile business, explained the overseas expansion path based on TikTok data, covering over 150 countries with 2 billion monthly active users, with Southeast Asia and Latin America leading global growth in home furnishing categories. Tactics such as immersive short videos, local influencers, and Keqiao industrial belt origin live streaming provide replicable cross-border operation solutions for factories and brands. Notably, cross-border e-commerce is changing the order structure of traditional foreign trade, with small orders, fast returns, and flexible supply chains becoming new requirements. This is both an opportunity and a test for industrial clusters like Keqiao—whether they can quickly respond to overseas consumers' personalized needs will determine the ceiling of going global.
Policy and Platform: From Solo Efforts to Ecosystem Collaboration
Liang Pengcheng, vice president of the China National Textile and Apparel Council, emphasized in his speech that this year marks the beginning of the '15th Five-Year Plan.' The industry should focus on technology, fashion, green, and health directions, activate new quality productivity through AI digital transformation, deepen green manufacturing, and rely on the Keqiao industrial chain to expand domestic and international markets. The China Home Textile Association proposed six major goals: improving the global diversified supply chain, deeply exploring domestic soft furnishing renewal demand, activating new quality productivity through AI and industry-academia-research integration, building Chinese home textile aesthetic independent brands, implementing full-chain carbon footprint standards, and laying out healthy sleep laboratories. These goals outline the industry's roadmap for the next five years from six dimensions: supply chain, domestic demand, technology, brand, green, and health.
Keqiao, as the host, is also actively upgrading its platform functions. Through UFI-certified professional exhibitions, it connects industries, promotes intelligent and green transformation, and relies on 'Silk Road Keqiao, Fabric Around the World' to expand overseas markets. During the annual meeting, the association announced continued collaboration with Keqiao China Textile City and the Curtain Fabric Association to regularly hold themed industry exchanges and supply chain docking meetings. This shift from one-off events to long-term mechanisms means that industrial collaboration is no longer a temporary measure but a systematic project embedded in daily operations.