Sure you can, you just bootstrap through monetising the ground work. For example, if you want a product company you can start out as a freelance design agency. The bulk of the initial design work will be for clients, but you can be involved with low volume manufacturing on the side. As the company grows, not only do you have the funds to take on progressively more ambitious product manufacturing projects, you've also built up a team of designers that can help push these projects forward. You're going to need designers right? Why not get them making you money from day one.
To give an alternative example, let's say you want to manufacture mobile phones. A good way to start small would be to manufacture accessories for existing phones. This is within the grasp of anyone within the Western world, given enough drive to do it. The revenue and knowledge you can gain doing so allows for increasingly sophisticated accessories to be built until the point where you have your own manufacturing premises (or have access to one at low rates, due to the volume of products you're pushing). The step from this point to manufacturing mobile phones is not that great.
Does this require more patience than burning through VC money? Sure, but it's also lower risk. Building a company gradually from the ground up means you get a better sense of what it takes to run a successful business (or in other words, experience is the best teacher).
Not only that, but the buyers of product and services are often different as well.
Sure, building up a huge services company lets you squirrel off some funds for product development, but how often do you see this in practice? The only example I can think of is IBM, and they're moving in the other direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adafruit_Industries#History
A similar example being this product company, which started out in 2012 with two people and a laser cutter, growing to a product company that employs 30+ people within the space of 5 years:
As a side note, thank you for founding Hackaday also, it's one of my favourite websites.
As for examples of design consultancies morphing into manufacturing companies, Cambridge Audio is one such example:
Except for every company that came before the current dot-com cycle.