A 250 billion yuan market! The "Warm Industry" new trend is here

Recently, multiple rounds of cold waves have swept across many parts of the country, driving up sales of down jackets. By 2025, China’s down jacket market size will surpass 250 billion yuan. What new changes are happening in this “warm industry” worth hundreds of billions? What new opportunities are hidden within?

A clothing city in Pinghu, Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, gathers over 2,000 sales booths, offering a wide variety of down jackets in different styles, with thriving business. For every 10 down jackets sold nationwide, 8 come from here.

After New Year’s Day 2025, this clothing city gradually shifted from wholesale to retail mode, with daily foot traffic reaching tens of thousands and daily sales exceeding 300 million yuan. Besides offline stores, online sales are also busy pushing year-end performance. In the live broadcast rooms for down jackets, hosts are promoting their own products.

Several down jacket company executives told reporters that consumers’ demands for down jackets are no longer limited to warmth; functionality, design, and fabric quality are now key considerations.

At a down jacket manufacturer in Pinghu, workers are rushing to fulfill an urgent order. “Hardshell down jackets” are the company’s flagship product, combining two mature categories—hardshell jackets and down jackets. Besides warmth from down, they also feature waterproof and other functions typical of hardshell jackets.

Currently, hardshell down jackets are a best-seller for this company, with over 2,800 units sold and sales exceeding 2 million yuan.

Less than a week before the Milan order fair, fashion designer Shen Weilian’s team plans to bring more than ten styles to the event, continuously refining and adjusting materials, styles, colors, and patterns.

The team has combined “Jiangnan bamboo weaving” with down jackets to launch a new category called “woven down fashion.”

Currently, their down jackets are sold in over 80 buyer stores across 19 countries, with overseas customers highly favoring Chinese intangible cultural heritage crafts.

By 2025, a total of 1,200 down jackets of various types have been sold overseas, generating about 8 million yuan in sales.

From a single focus on warmth to multifunctionality, from daily wear to multi-scene adaptation, from mass-market to high-end boutique, down jackets in Pinghu, Zhejiang, are continuously undergoing a stunning transformation.

Today, Pinghu has become one of the largest down jacket manufacturing bases in the country, with annual sales exceeding 50 billion yuan. As the industry continues to grow in scale, how to promote the shift from “scale leadership” to “quality-driven” transformation has become a key development challenge. The local government launched a down jacket quality grading system in 2025.

The fabric and raw materials of down jackets are equally important. Most fabrics for Pinghu’s down jacket industry come from Shengze, Jiangsu.

At a fabric company in Shengze, Jiangsu, a fashion designer combined traditional Song brocade fabric with down jackets. After repeated experiments, the team made the Song brocade fabric lighter and softer, better suited to the characteristics of down jackets, launching more than ten styles of Song brocade down jackets.

It is reported that this company’s annual fabric sales reach around 200 million yuan, with finished clothing sales about 42 million yuan. The average price of each Song brocade down jacket is around 6,000 yuan. This winter, once launched, a single product achieved sales of 140,000 yuan.

Whether it is the fashionization of intangible cultural heritage Song brocade or the technological advancement of functional fabrics, both point to a common development direction for Jiangsu’s textile industry: from OEM production to original design, and then to branding operations. With the help of technology and innovation, the textile and apparel industry is undergoing a transformation and upgrade.

An ordinary down jacket, in fierce market competition, continues to innovate with new styles and higher standards. It must maintain core warmth functions while also incorporating waterproof, wear-resistant, moisture-wicking, lightweight, and other new features. Some even blend fashion design with intangible cultural heritage crafts, allowing Eastern aesthetics to shine on international runways. This is a vivid example of how the traditional clothing industry is breaking through in the niche market of down jackets, also confirming a simple development principle: as long as you are willing to invest in design and craftsmanship, refine your work, and firmly pursue branding and quality, you can break through bottlenecks and achieve a breakthrough.

(Article source: CCTV Finance)