Durmus Cakar
Founder & Lead Engineer, DC Fiber Solutions
With 11 years of molded fiber packaging expertise, DC Fiber Solutions helps manufacturers accurately define their needs and transition from plastic to recyclable, PPWR-compliant fiber packaging.
A decade inside the material, not just around it.
I’m Durmuş Çakar, founder and lead engineer at DC Fiber Solutions. I hold a Master’s degree in Automotive Engineering and a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Pamukkale University, including a year of study at OTH Regensburg in Germany.
For more than ten years, I’ve worked as a design and process engineer inside molded fiber packaging operations — first in Turkey, later across international teams in Romania — designing tooling and packaging, commissioning ABB and KUKA robotic production systems, and taking projects from first concept through to serial production at scale. That experience covers every major molding method: thermoform, transfer molding, wet press, after-press, and thick-wall forming.
My graduate research — on optimal heating system design for thermoform mold drying, focused on heat distribution and insulation in resistance-heated molds — was published at the 2nd International Conference on Engineering, Natural and Social Sciences (2023). It’s the kind of detail that rarely gets discussed outside a factory floor, but it’s exactly what determines whether tooling produces a consistent part or an inconsistent one.
Design development and optimization for molded fiber packaging, across thermoform, transfer molding, wet press, after-press, and thick-wall processes.
Tooling feasibility and process alignment — designing for how a mold will actually perform, not just how a part looks in CAD.
Supplier evaluation and technical coordination, from first sample to validated production.
Risk identification and quality assurance using Six Sigma, FMEA, and DFM/DFA methods, built on years of hands-on production experience rather than guesswork.
Project management from concept through to stable mass production.
Cost-reduction engineering — identifying where design changes reduce material use or production cost without compromising performance.
On most packaging projects, development passes through several hands — a design engineer, a process engineer, a project manager, someone from quality, someone from sales. Each handoff adds time, and each one is a place where details get lost.
On a DC Fiber Solutions project, that’s all one person. I design the part, understand the process constraints of every molding method well enough to design for them rather than around them, manage the project timeline, and catch quality issues before they reach tooling. When it’s time to talk numbers, I can take a concept all the way to something a manufacturer can quote and build, without waiting on someone else’s availability.
That’s not a staffing shortcut. It’s why projects move in days, not weeks.
More recently, I’ve worked directly as an independent technical partner to a European moulded-pulp packaging business — supporting design development, tooling feasibility, and supplier coordination from outside their internal team. That work confirmed something I already suspected: the best technical decisions come from someone who isn’t tied to keeping one factory’s production line busy.
I don’t own a factory. That’s deliberate. It means the engineering decisions I make — material choice, process selection, tooling approach — are based on what’s right for your product and volume, not on what keeps someone else’s machines running. When a project is ready to move into production, I help identify and evaluate the manufacturing partner best suited to the job — based on process fit, cost, and lead time.