When showrooms compete not by stacked fabrics but by whole-home scenes, the curtain industry's competitive logic has quietly changed. The 2026 (Autumn) 18th Shaoxing Keqiao China Light Textile City Curtain Fabric Exhibition sent a clear signal: soft furnishing is moving from 'selling fabric' to 'selling space', and this shift will have profound effects up and down the supply chain.
Fair Trends: Scene-based Display Becomes Standard, Light New Chinese Style Emerges
The most visible change at this fair is the replacement of traditional sample stalls with immersive whole-home experience spaces. Styles such as modern minimalist, gentle French, retro vintage, and light new Chinese are neatly arranged, allowing buyers and designers to directly perceive the real effect of curtains in a home setting. Brands like Juzi Yinxiang abandoned single-product displays in favor of whole-home atmosphere matching. Their representative stated that soft furnishing has long left the low-price era of 'selling by fabric volume', with competition now centered on aesthetics, matching ability, and space creation.
In terms of style, terminal aesthetics have broken away from a single influencer style, presenting a diversified pattern of minimalist base, personalized accents, and rising national style. Dopamine bright colors, French retro, and vintage texture styles remain popular among young consumers, while light new Chinese style became the biggest highlight of this edition. Unlike the heavy and complex traditional Chinese design of previous years, the 2026 new Chinese style uses low-saturation base colors like light mist gray, milk coffee, and rice white, combined with simplified oriental lines and delicate embroidery, reducing heaviness and enhancing transparency. It preserves elegant oriental charm while adapting to modern large flat-floor apartments, making it the first choice for high-end home furnishing and custom soft furnishing.
Industry Transmission: Fabric Iteration and Functional Upgrades Reshape Value Chain
Upgrades in fabric selection are another clear line. Chenille and high-precision fabrics remain mainstream, but yarns are finer, gram weight is increased, and drape is improved, catering to the trend of 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 criteria. Window decoration categories are also undergoing structural upgrades: light-transmitting but non-see-through phantom gauze and textured gauze have become household standards, with sheer curtains shifting from supporting to starring roles. High-shade, anti-sun, abrasion-resistant, and permanently shaped functional ready-made curtains continue to sell well, while blinds, honeycomb shades, and custom-shaped window treatments expand. Whole-home window covering integration has become a new profit point for stores.
These changes mean curtains have evolved from simple light-blocking fabric to core soft furnishing items that determine home quality. For upstream fabric companies, hard indicators like gram weight, drape, and eco-friendliness directly influence order flow. For downstream stores, the ability to provide integrated window covering solutions will affect average order value and repurchase rates. The industry's shift from 'competing on volume and low price' to 'competing on design, quality, and innovation' is an irreversible trend.
Channel Revolution: Originality as Core, Omnichannel Operations as Standard
With fierce competition in a stagnant market, the space for low-price involution is shrinking, and original design has formally become an industry barrier. At this fair, it was evident that self-developed patterns, original texture processes, and exclusive colorways are more favored by buyers, while blind copying and homogeneous reproductions are accelerating elimination. At the same time, the traditional model of waiting for customers to come has completely failed. Short-video seeding, live-streaming cloud exhibitions for online traffic, combined with offline real-scene experience for precise transactions, have become the standard operating model for soft furnishing stores and source factories. The fair also launched cloud exhibition live streaming, with online visits far exceeding offline footfall. Customers select products online and negotiate orders offline, fully connecting the omnichannel chain.
The 'exhibition-trade integration' advantage of Keqiao continues to expand, with short-term exhibitions extending into year-round source markets. Buyers can capture annual fashion trends at the fair and then go deep into the Beilian physical market to connect with factory source orders, greatly shortening the supply-demand chain. With continued visits from overseas buyers, domestic fabric brands are accelerating their global expansion, broadening the market map of the curtain industry.