The 2026 autumn Keqiao curtain fair concluded, sending a clear signal: the curtain and soft furnishing industry is undergoing a qualitative shift from "selling fabric" to "selling space." At the venue, traditional booths piled with fabric samples have almost disappeared, replaced by immersive full-house real-scene experiences. This means the era of pure price competition is over; aesthetic and coordination abilities have become the new competitive thresholds.
Style Diversification: Light Chinese Style Rises, Personalized Demand Dominates
The most notable trend at this fair is style diversification, with lightweight new Chinese style emerging as the biggest dark horse. Unlike the heavy and complex traditional Chinese designs of previous years, the 2026 new Chinese style emphasizes "simple oriental, blending ancient and modern," using low-saturation base colors like light mist gray, milk coffee, and off-white, paired with minimalist lines and delicate embroidery. It retains oriental charm while fitting modern large flat units and improved residences. Behind this shift is the strong demand from young consumers for personalized, non-repetitive soft furnishing solutions; they are tired of the ubiquitous internet-famous cream style and instead seek niche, textured designs.
Dopamine bright colors, French vintage, and medieval texture styles also remain popular, reflecting that terminal aesthetics have completely moved away from a single internet-famous style, forming a diversified pattern of "minimalist base, personalized accents, and rising national style." For buyers, this means product selection can no longer rely on a single hit style but must build a multi-style matrix to cover preferences across different consumer segments.
Fabric Iteration: Texture and Eco-Friendliness Become Hard Indicators
At the fabric level, the industry has completed a round of quality upgrades. Classic chenille and high-precision fabrics still dominate, but with obvious iterations: yarns are finer and softer, offering a high-end soft luster; gram weight is increased, and drape is straight, adapting to large floor-to-ceiling windows. Natural eco-friendly fabrics are surging in popularity, with raw materials like cotton-linen blends and Tencel textures favored. No odor, high color fastness, and biodegradability have become hard purchasing standards.
Window dressing categories are also undergoing structural changes: thickened sheer fabrics with see-through-but-not-transparent properties and textured sheers have become standard in homes, with sheers evolving from supporting roles to protagonists in creating ambiance. Functional ready-made curtains with high light blocking, sun resistance, and permanent shaping continue to sell well, while blinds, honeycomb shades, and custom-shaped window treatments are expanding. This signals that integrated whole-home window dressing will become a new profit direction for stores, and the single-fabric sales model is unsustainable.
Originality and Channels: Reshaping Competitive Barriers
Against the backdrop of intense stock competition, the space for low-price involution is compressed, and original design has become the core industry barrier. At the fair, independently developed patterns, original texture techniques, and exclusive colorways were more favored by buyers, while homogeneous replicated products are gradually being phased out. The industry is shifting from "competing on output and price" to "competing on design, quality, and innovation."
Channel models have also been completely revolutionized. The traditional wait-for-customers approach is no longer effective; short-video seeding, live-streaming cloud exhibitions for online traffic, combined with offline real-scene experiences for precise transactions, have become the standard operating model for soft furnishing stores and source factories. This fair also launched cloud exhibition live streaming, with online visits far exceeding offline footfall, and customers selecting products online and placing orders offline, fully integrating the whole chain.
Keqiao's "exhibition-trade integration" advantage continues to amplify, extending the short-term exhibition into a year-round source market. Buyers can capture annual trends at the fair and then go to the Beilian physical market to connect with factory source orders, significantly shortening the supply chain. With continued visits from overseas buyers, domestic fabric brands are accelerating their global expansion, broadening the market map.