The overall purpose of this research is to generate knowledge on how and why to achieve a world-class product in the Brazilian manufacturing industry, locus of industrial design, with conclusive focus on the solid wood residential furniture industry. This is important because the manufacturing industry is the sector with the greatest inductive capacity of the economy, this being its strategic value, and for bringing the idea of industry rescue in the face of deindustrialization process. The precondition for this proposal is that the industry is internationally competitive and for that we will need world-class products. The research is a case study involving four industries of solid wood residential furniture to validate the hypothesis that the simultaneous conjunction of design as a strategic tools for business, lean manufacturing and incorporation of digital technology into the industry ecosystem creates favourable conditions to reach a world class product. The choice of cases was made in order to provide for replications of the predicted theory. We used seven categories of data sources and adopted the strategy of following our theoretical proposition that provided subsides to the data collection plan. As an analytical technique we strong emphasis on the overlap between collection and analysis through perceptions recorded alongside the data on display matrix. This also brings the consistencies with the revised literature and the evidence between the cases from where we extracted the cross-patterns that resulted in a list of reference beacons for reaching a world-class product. The conclusion brings the selected cases showing similar results and thus providing consistency with our theoretical propositions. Like all research this one also presents limitations to be explored: to promote analytical generalization with other typologies of manufacturing industries, with other categories of industries since the four selected ones are familiar industries and that the reference beacons are not exhausted in the found ones, with new ones being mapped.