The 18th China Textile City Curtain & Fabric Exhibition in Keqiao, Shaoxing, has concluded, but the signals it left are more significant than the new fabrics on display. The most visible change was not in products but in exhibition formats—traditional fabric-stacked booths nearly disappeared, replaced by immersive full-room scene experiences. This indicates a shift in the competitive dimension of soft furnishings: the focus is no longer on price per meter but on the comprehensive ability of aesthetics, coordination, and space creation.
From Selling Fabric to Selling Space
At the fair, modern minimalist, gentle French, retro vintage, and light Chinese-style spaces became standard configurations. Brands like Juzi Yinxiang completely abandoned single-product displays in favor of whole-home ambiance matching. Behind this transformation lies an upgraded consumption logic—curtains are no longer just light-blocking cloth but core items that determine home texture and evoke spatial emotion. For buyers, the criteria for selecting suppliers have also changed: the ability to provide holistic solutions matters more than offering low-priced fabrics.
The Rise of Light Chinese Style and Fabric Evolution
In terms of style, terminal aesthetics have completely moved away from a single internet-famous trend, showing a diversified pattern of minimalist basics, personalized accents, and the rise of national style. Among these, light Chinese style became the biggest hit. Leading brands like Kalamilu use low-saturation base colors such as mist gray, latte, and off-white, paired with freehand oriental lines and delicate embroidery, reducing heaviness and enhancing transparency. This style precisely fits modern large flats and improved residential projects, indicating that the high-end home and custom soft furnishing markets are tilting toward oriental aesthetics.
Fabrics have also undergone a round of quality upgrades. Chenille and high-density jacquard remain mainstream, but yarns are finer, weights are increased, and drape is improved, adapting to the trend of large floor-to-ceiling windows. Natural eco-friendly fabrics are surging in popularity, with cotton-linen blends and Tencel textures becoming hard requirements for end consumers—no odor, high color fastness, and biodegradability are now must-haves rather than bonuses. Curtain accessories are also upgrading structurally: light-transmitting but not see-through illusion gauze has become standard, turning sheer curtains from supporting roles to protagonists. High-blackout, permanent-shape functional ready-made curtains are selling well, and blinds, honeycomb shades, and custom-shaped window treatments are expanding, making whole-window integration a new profit point for stores.
Dual Transformation: Original Design and Channels
As market competition intensifies, the room for low-price involution continues to shrink, and original design has officially become a barrier. At the fair, self-developed patterns, original texture techniques, and exclusive color schemes were favored by buyers, while homogeneous copies were quickly phased out. The industry is shifting from competing on output and low prices to competing on design, quality, and innovation. For factories, this means R&D investment is no longer an optional cost but a survival baseline.
Channel models have also been completely reformed. The traditional approach of waiting for customers to walk in is no longer effective. Short-video seeding, live-streaming cloud exhibitions for online traffic, combined with offline immersive experiences for precise conversion, have become the standard operating model for soft furnishing stores and source factories. This fair also launched cloud exhibition live streaming, with online viewership far exceeding offline visitors, enabling customers to select products online and place orders offline, thus opening up the entire chain. Keqiao's advantage of integrating exhibitions and trade continues to expand, extending the short-term fair into a year-round source market. Buyers can capture annual trends at the fair and then visit the Beilian physical market to connect with factory orders, greatly shortening the supply-demand chain.