First Time in Lahore: A Recap of CFT Asia 2026

From July 4 to 6, 2026, Weaverine Textile (Anhui Wurun Textile Co., Ltd.) exhibited at CFT Asia 2026 — the 2026 Pakistan (Lahore) Asia International Fabric, Accessories, Yarn and Textile Exhibition — at Booth B-190 in Lahore, Pakistan. Held over three days at the Expo Centre Lahore, the fair marked our first time exhibiting in the city, and our team's first visit to Pakistan altogether — a milestone we had been looking forward to for some time.

This was Weaverine's first time exhibiting in Lahore, and our first visit to Pakistan as a company. Our team arrived in the middle of Lahore's hot July and set up at Booth B-190 with a full range of swatches, catalogs, and sample books covering our embossed, peachskin, dyed, white, washable, disperse, pigment, and yarn-dyed fabric lines. The city left a strong impression on us from the first day, from the warmth of the welcome at the fairgrounds to the scale and energy of Pakistan's textile trade more broadly. Lahore is one of Pakistan's principal textile and garment manufacturing centers, and that identity was visible everywhere at the show, from the machinery on display in neighboring halls to the technical depth of the questions buyers brought to our booth. It is a market we are glad to have visited in person after years of serving customers there mostly by phone and message, and one we look forward to returning to.

Over three days, our booth welcomed a steady mix of familiar faces and new ones. Several longtime customers who source from us regularly made a point of stopping by in person, giving us a chance to catch up beyond the usual calls and emails and talk through plans for the months ahead. For a relationship normally carried on almost entirely by phone and message, sitting down together to review upcoming orders and new colors and constructions face to face was one of the more rewarding parts of the fair.

Just as many conversations were with buyers meeting us for the first time. Several sat down with our team to work through catalogs and swatches in detail, asking about everything from weight and hand-feel to minimum order quantities and shipping terms — the kind of unhurried conversation that trade fairs make possible, and one that often marks the start of a new sourcing relationship. By the second day, a number of these first meetings had already turned into requests for samples and formal quotations.

Foot traffic at the fair was considerable throughout, and our booth saw a steady flow of visitors across all three days rather than a single busy afternoon. The aisle in front of Booth B-190 stayed busy from the opening hour each morning through the final stretch of the show, with buyers moving methodically between exhibitors to compare weights, finishes, and pricing before doubling back to the mills they liked best. Product tags for our embossed, peachskin, dyed, white, washable, disperse, pigment, and yarn-dyed lines helped visitors quickly find the categories most relevant to their business, and our team stayed busy fielding questions on specifications, MOQs, and lead times with barely a pause between visitors. By the close of the fair, we had worked through several notebooks' worth of business cards and follow-up notes.

Interest at the booth concentrated around a few product lines in particular. 3D embossed fabric drew consistent attention for its raised, tactile surface texture — many buyers picked up a swatch and ran a hand across it before asking a single question. Our dual-jet fabrics, woven with a construction that gives the fabric a distinct, textured two-tone face, were a frequent topic of conversation, with several buyers viewing samples under different angles of light to judge how the two-tone effect would read in finished bedding. Embossed relief-print fabrics, which combine a printed pattern with a pressed surface texture, also stood out as a category several buyers wanted to explore further for upcoming collections, and a handful of conversations moved quickly into specifics on repeat patterns and color placement.

CFT Asia's Lahore edition is not a small or new event. The 2026 show was the 34th edition of the fair overall, part of a series that has run for roughly two decades across Karachi, Faisalabad, and Lahore, organized by Ecommerce Gateway Pakistan (Pvt.) Ltd. and widely described as Pakistan's largest textile, clothing, and textile machinery industry fair. This year's edition drew more than 300 exhibitors from Pakistan, Turkey, China, Malaysia, Italy, Germany, Russia, Belgium, India, and Japan, spanning yarns, fabrics, trims, and finished clothing — giving manufacturers, retailers, designers, and product-development teams a comprehensive view of the textile manufacturing process under one roof.

That scale reflects a trade relationship that is already well established. According to a 2026 market report, China supplies roughly 81 percent of the import value of Pakistan's woven fabrics made from man-made filaments and staple fibers — far ahead of the next-largest suppliers, Thailand and Saudi Arabia, each in the low single digits. Pakistan is itself one of the world's leading consuming markets for these fabrics, and the same report projects continued growth in demand through the mid-2030s, driven largely by the country's own garment and home-textile production. That backdrop helps explain why a mill like ours travels to a fair like CFT Asia: Pakistani buyers are, by a wide margin, already sourcing the bulk of their man-made fabric from Chinese suppliers, and events in Lahore give both sides a chance to meet in person and build the kind of direct working relationships that a purely remote supply chain does not allow.

CFT Asia 2026 gave us a valuable first look at the Lahore market, and the response over three days has left us optimistic about building on the connections we made. Seen against a trade relationship in which Chinese mills already supply most of Pakistan's man-made fabric imports, that first-hand experience matters: it lets us hear directly from Pakistani buyers rather than relying on secondhand feedback. We are grateful to everyone, old friends and new, who stopped by Booth B-190.

If you visited us in Lahore or would like to follow up on a conversation from the fair, you are welcome to contact our team or chat with Wren for specifications, samples, or quotations.