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For decades rural industrialization in Indonesia have been undervalued in policy process and academic discourse. The strategy is often associated with natural resources exploitation in rural regions or agropolitan development. In fact, its emergence has portrayed long-standing dominance of urban biased development over rural resources. Instead of fostering rural specific commodities and strengthening local ownership, many cases have shown poor strategy formulation causing broader confusions and uncertainties among stakeholders. This paper aims to address this issue by examining case studies of batik industry in a few localities of Central Java Province. The comparative case study method is undertaken to explore how the local batik industry in each location may perform endogenous rural-based industry. The data collection and analytical methods involve content analysis of government publications, previous studies, and media exposures which are triangulated with excerpts of key informant interviews and field observations. The results show distinguished performance of the local batik industry in pursuit of the rural industrialization trajectories. Even though all of the cases highlight strong government influence in promoting the industry, those which have possessed higher entrepreneurial capacity and informal leadership could be successful to achieve rural industrialization strategy properly.