Between Hangzhou and Shanghai, Haining is China's leather capital. Its China Leather City, opened in 1994, is the largest leather-and-fur market in Asia, with turnover in the hundreds of billions of yuan. The fur coat in a Russian winter and the stretch in your yoga pants can both trace back here.
Haining, in Jiaxing, sits squarely between Hangzhou and Shanghai, and it is China's leather capital. Its China Leather City, opened in 1994 and now a publicly listed company, is the most influential leather market in the country and the largest specialised leather-and-fur market in Asia, multiple multi-storey malls of finished leather jackets, fur coats, raw hides of mink, fox and cowhide, bags and footwear, with annual turnover in the hundred-billions of yuan and millions of visitors. Russia is the single biggest buyer of Haining's fur and heavy leather, for obvious reasons of climate.
The skill is old, the market is new. Haining's leatherwork goes back to the late Qing and early Republic, when craftsmen made belts and bags by hand; it grew into a global leather-garment base, and the China Leather City of 1994 turned that base into a marketplace. Many firms are vertically integrated, owning the tannery, the design studio and the factory at once, and the town has grown its own brands, Snow Leopard and the light-luxury label FOVVO, founded in 2003 by a team that had made bags for Coach and Michael Kors. The positioning is “high quality, mid-to-high price,” edging toward luxury and the Italians.
Haining has a quieter second identity that few shoppers ever connect to the fur malls. In its Maqiao district, German warp-knitting machines run around the clock turning out high-performance fabric, the elastic base cloth for yoga pants and swimwear, plus technical textiles for car interiors. So Haining occupies two premium corners of the clothing world at once: luxury materials in leather and fur, and performance materials in warp knits. It is a town that sells both the mink coat and the gym legging's stretch.
Haining is one corner of the northern-Zhejiang garment triangle, with Puyuan's sweater market and Zhili's children's-wear town both within about forty kilometres, all in the Hang-Jia-Hu silk plain. (Haining is famous for one more thing entirely: the Qiantang River tidal bore, the largest in the world, which draws crowds every autumn a short way from the leather malls.) Cross-links below.