Leading Chinese song brocade (Songjin) label Shang Jiu Kai appeared on CCTV-3’s Culture in Ten Minutes in early June 2026, showcasing four product categories at the Hangzhou Brocade Tour exhibition. The segment highlighted the brand’s blend of heritage technique and contemporary design, with each category representing a different facet of Songjin’s commercial evolution.
Daily Accessory
The bag collection featured both classic and new series, including the San Duo Brocade, Plum Blossom, and Phoenix in Flight lines alongside the newly launched Peacock Feather series, all translating traditional Songjin patterns into functional everyday accessories. The decision to extend the brocade from ceremonial and home-textile applications into handbags reflects a broader industry trend, as Songjin is too dense and too costly for clothing lines at mass-market price points but works well for accent pieces and structured goods. The bag category has become a leading entry point for first-time Songjin buyers.
The apparel segment previewed the brand’s 2026 spring-summer collection, designed by Bian Huizhong, which drew its concept from the Zhuangzi chapter “Shanmu” and the line “drift and float with the Dao.” A signature piece mixed xiangyunsha with Songjin fabric for a soft-yet-structured finish, with a small Songjin-folded collar designed for modern commuting. The collection marked Shang Jiu Kai’s most aggressive push into ready-to-wear, and the Hangzhou exhibition was timed to coincide with the spring buying cycle for the brand’s retail partners.
Digital Production
Most notable was Shang Jiu Kai’s status as China’s first large-scale user of digital and intelligent production in Songjin weaving. The company has laid out a three-to-five-year plan to build a smart production-management system tailored to Songjin’s specific weaving process, a step toward preserving the texture of hand-weaving while standardizing quality and throughput. The challenge is substantial: Songjin’s traditional pattern library is enormous, and most production recipes are stored as tacit knowledge held by master weavers rather than as digital files.
Conversion of those recipes into machine-readable form is the central technical task, and one that the brand has been working on with software and textile-engineering partners. Successful digitization would let Shang Jiu Kai scale production without losing the distinctive surface and color effects that define Songjin, while reducing dependence on a shrinking pool of senior weavers. The brand’s narrative, “the endless growth of cultural vitality,” frames its work as a continuous extension of Songjin into contemporary life, and the CCTV-3 appearance was an opportunity to communicate that vision to a national audience beyond the existing customer base.