Why Made In China?

Where the fabric behind every Doux Rêves piece comes from

People ask me this more than almost anything else: why is it made in China? I can tell they're expecting a defensive answer. I don't need one. China is where bamboo has been grown and worked into everyday life for thousands of years, and it's still where the skill and the scale to turn it into bamboo fabric material like ours exists.

The bamboo kingdom

China holds one of the largest shares of the world's bamboo resources: over 6.67 million hectares of bamboo forest, according to China's National Forestry and Grassland Administration. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations names China and India as the two countries with the largest bamboo resources worldwide. More than 500 species grow in China, out of roughly 1,200 worldwide. It's not a modern title either. China has been called the "Bamboo Kingdom" for generations, and the International Bamboo and Rattan Organisation, the intergovernmental body dedicated to bamboo and rattan, is headquartered in Beijing, the first intergovernmental organization headquartered in the country.

Source: China's Ninth National Forest Inventory (2014–2018), via the Chinese Academy of Forestry.

Bamboo carries recognized heritage status there too. UNESCO's East Asia office has documented Chishui, in Guizhou province, where bamboo forest covers a large share of an already heavily forested region. Local bamboo traditions hold formal recognition: single bamboo drifting, a traditional way of navigating bamboo rafts, has national-level living-heritage status, and bamboo weaving specifically holds provincial-level recognition. Since 2018, UNESCO's regional office has also run a bamboo sustainability pilot in the area. This isn't a craft that showed up to meet demand for soft baby fabric. It's centuries deep.

From heritage to industry

None of that history is what makes bamboo viscose fabric material on its own, though. Turning a woody stalk into a fiber soft enough for a newborn takes real industrial infrastructure: pulping, dissolving, spinning, and finishing at a scale most countries never built for this specific crop. That first step, pulping, isn't new at all. It's the same starting point once used to turn bamboo into paper, centuries before it was ever used to make fabric.

Traditional Chinese papermaking, the pulping tradition bamboo pulp paper was later built on, with bamboo paper itself emerging by the Tang dynasty (618 to 907 CE).

China's bamboo industry as a whole, spanning everything from furniture and flooring to paper pulp, shoots, and fiber products, has an annual output value of close to 320 billion yuan, close to 50 billion US dollars, according to figures from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.

Bamboo viscose fabric material belongs to a broader family called manmade cellulosic fibers. That family made up 8.4 million tons of global fiber production in 2024, about 6% of everything the world's textile industry produced that year, according to Textile Exchange. China is one of the world's largest manufacturers of viscose specifically, built on decades of investment in processing capacity to match the scale of its raw bamboo resources.

We wanted the best quality and a long term capacity

We didn't choose a manufacturing country first and work backward. We chose a fabric, bamboo viscose, tested and certified to OEKO-TEX Standard 100 Class I, for how it feels against a newborn sensitive skin. China has the expertise to make that fabric well, consistently, and to the standard we require.

Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), World Bamboo Resources; China's National Forestry and Grassland Administration, via China Daily and Xinhua; International Bamboo and Rattan Organisation (INBAR); UNESCO Regional Office for East Asia, on Chishui's bamboo-related intangible cultural heritage; Textile Exchange, Materials Market Report 2025; Yashi Paper, "The Story of Bamboo Pulp Paper Begins Like This."