Editor's note: MasayaCo co-founder Aram Terry and Masaya Homes co-founder Olin Cohan joined Ryan Flahive on the Climate Changers podcast in April 2025 to talk about how a Peace Corps friendship in a Nicaraguan fishing village grew into a company that has planted more than 1.3 million trees and built a furniture and prefab-home business around what Aram calls "reforestation through design."
The full transcript is below. It covers the Peace Corps years in Padre Ramos, how the first 80-acre plantation started in 2008, meeting Abril and the origin of MasayaCo's handwoven chairs, the shift into Masaya Homes and prefab construction, and what the Seed to Seat® business model actually means when you trace it forest to finished product.
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Climate Changers publishes weekly conversations with entrepreneurs, scientists, activists, and educators working on the climate crisis. The show is a celebration of the people building a new and sustainable resource and energy economy.
Aram Terry and Olin Cohan, co-founders of MasayaCo and Masaya Homes.
The full conversation.
Meeting in Padre Ramos, Nicaragua.
Flavs: Today my guests are Aram Terry and Olin Cohan, owners and co-founders of MasayaCo and Masaya Homes. Aram and Olin, welcome to the show.
Aram and Olin: Hi, thanks for having us. Great to be here.
Flavs: So you guys met in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua. Can you paint a picture for our listeners of what Padre Ramos was like back in the early 2000s?
Olin: I went into the Peace Corps in 2001, September of 2001, and was in training outside of Managua for three months, and then was placed in a small fishing village in the northwest corner of the country. It's an extremely remote, thatched roof. "Ranchos" are what they're called, palapas, essentially. I was placed up there with a local nonprofit who was managing the area as a protected area. My main focus was on environmental education in the schools, and then working with the local nonprofit on conservation projects. It was an extremely rewarding experience. I was there for six months or so, and the nonprofit was looking for another volunteer to come up and help. That's when I met Aram, back in 2002. He came up to do small business development. I was working in the schools. A lot of the people we were working with had never met a gringo before. Aram and I became close friends and worked together on a handful of conservation projects in the area, including turtle conservation and environmental education programs and a small business program within the area. And then that expanded into a nonprofit that we founded towards the end of our service. We were working with the local universities, funding and training Nicaraguan university students doing research in environmental education and protected areas throughout the country.
Life at the end of the road.
Flavs: And what were some of the most memorable moments of meeting and working together in that environment?
Aram: Well, like Olin said, we lived basically in ranchos, home-roofed huts. My house actually had no walls and a sand floor. But yeah, it was at the end of the road, an end-of-the-road fishing village. And sometimes the wind would blow really hard and the power would go out for about two weeks. So Olin and I had to figure out a lot of different ways to entertain ourselves. Trying to learn how to play guitar and doing things like that. But yeah, it was just overall a total day and night experience from what we were used to.
Nicaragua at the end of the road.
Raising families between Nicaragua and the US.
Flavs: And now you both have Nica wives and are raising families between Nicaragua and the US. How has that unique cultural experience shaped your lives and your work?
Aram: Well, I wouldn't change it for anything. I like being down here, I still live in Nicaragua. I live in another beach community called San Juan del Sur. I think it's really important for everyone these days to see all the different sides of the world and the different ways that people live in different communities. And Nicaragua has a lot of nice aspects to it. It's not developing as quickly as the rest of the world. There's a lot of space, we don't have to deal with traffic as much, it's very rural, peaceful. And then when we need to go up to the US and get our dose of hyper intense development, we can go do it.
Olin: I lived in Nicaragua full time from 2001 to 2017, and then moved back up to California, Sonoma County, where I grew up, in 2017. As Aram said, the combination of spending a lot of time in Nicaragua and also having some time in California has been great. Both my daughters were born and raised in Nicaragua and now live here in California. I think it's also added a lot to their perspective on the world, to have strong cultural ties to both countries.
Aram: Right. I also have two daughters, and they go to a school on an organic farm. They walk past the chicken coop on the way to school. And then over Easter, we'll be up in Nashville at our parents' house, doing an Easter egg hunt. So it is. It's a great thing to get the best of both worlds.
How witnessing deforestation shaped MasayaCo.
Flavs: And how did witnessing deforestation in Nicaragua influence your perspectives on sustainability and ultimately inspire you to take action?
Aram: I was assigned to Nicaragua by the Peace Corps. We didn't really get to pick where we were going. And this was in 2002, so it was really hard to find any information about Nicaragua or what to expect. I had to actually go to the library and check out books, back when we used to do that. But still, there wasn't much about the country. So when I came here, I was expecting to see expanses of jungle and undeveloped areas. But really, by the time I got here, you could see that rural agriculture had pretty much impacted every square inch of the country. There are people living across the whole country, small farmers everywhere having an impact on the forest. So even areas that on a map looked like untouched jungle, there were actually people living there and doing cattle farming, and doing rice and beans, that kind of thing. So seeing it on the ground was very different from what I had in my head before I came down here. And then as time went by, seeing the change happen was a very impactful experience. Cattle farming, which is one of the biggest agricultural practices here, has really quadrupled over the last few years, and I watched the pastures spread across the country. When you see this happening, you know it's just people trying to make a living, especially when you know them and you've lived amongst them. So you can't really blame the people doing the deforestation for the impact they're having on the environment. But it is absolutely shocking to see firsthand kilometers of forest cleared in a short period of time.
Olin: Even going back to our Peace Corps days, we were tasked with having an impact on conservation efforts in protected areas. When you get there, it's not like going to Yosemite, where nobody lives and it's fully conservation efforts. You're going to communities where people historically have lived off of the resources. So you need to look for alternatives and conservation efforts that also impact the communities economically. And I think that's where Aram's initial reforestation efforts sort of were born. Kind of seeing, all right, you can't just conserve, you need to also look for economic alternatives for communities.
"You can't just conserve. You need to also look for economic alternatives for communities."— Olin Cohan
Over 1.3 million trees, more than 1,300 acres of land under active reforestation in Nicaragua.
The first reforestation projects.
Flavs: Let's dig into that a little deeper. What did those early projects look like, and how did they impact local communities in Nicaragua?
Aram: After learning about how agriculture and reforestation happens in the tropics, it's not done by big corporations, it's done by poor farmers trying to make a living. It took years for me to understand how all that worked. And once I did, I came across some other projects here. There was a French businessman named Clement Poncon who was doing reforestation projects basically as a business, reforesting cattle pastures as a long-term business to produce wood. So after seeing how small businesses were the ones driving the deforestation, the idea of having a business that pushes reforestation just stuck in my head, and it's still stuck in my head. So after working with them for a while and learning how they planted, what the planting matrix looked like, and what trees they were planting, we decided, basically with my father, to do a small plantation ourselves. That was in 2008. We rented about an 80-acre farm that had been deforested for cattle, did a nursery, and started planting trees. There was a lot of learning involved from there. The first plantings we did, we were trying to recreate a native forest: mostly native species, spaced around three by three yards, every tree, so about 500 per acre. What we learned after a few years of doing this was that in those stands, there was too much competition between the trees, and some wouldn't grow while others would dominate. And if the end goal was to actually have a sustainable business that produced wood we could use, the stands that were productive were teak stands. So we shifted, maybe in year two or three, to teak stands, growing just teak on the pasture areas of the farm, and conserving the 30 to 40 percent of forest that was already on the farm as our native reserves. That's kind of how our plantation model developed over time.
From reforestation to handcrafted teak furniture.
Flavs: And then how did you transition from that to building a brand recognized for handcrafted, solid-teak modern furniture?
Aram: Around the same time we were starting the plantations, there was a hurricane on the Atlantic coast. So we got into extracting logs that had fallen in the flattened forests and exporting the lumber to the US and to the Caribbean, mostly. So around the same time we started planting, we actually got into wood processing and sawmilling. It was a crash course on both ends, where we were learning the planting and the value-added production side of it at the same time. Having those two experiences at once is what completed the whole idea of a business that's driven by reforestation but is economically viable. The more we sell, the more we produce, the more we can plant. That's where the roots of the idea started. By 2010, 2011, we had a lot of lumber that we were exporting and we were also planting. So inevitably, learning about lumber and lumber processing, we started to get local carpentry jobs, local millwork jobs, and started adding value with doors, windows, cabinets, that kind of thing. It completed the value chain, where we were doing everything from the nursery all the way through to the finished product. It happened over maybe a four or five year period, where we were learning the different value-added levels in the whole wood supply chain. And the goal always was: how can we create something where our products are driving more reforestation?
"The more we sell, the more we produce, the more we can plant."— Aram Terry
Abril Zepeda, MasayaCo co-founder. She turned the plain woven chair into the colorful patterns MasayaCo is known for today.
Meeting Abril and the origin of the handwoven chairs.
Flavs: And then tell us about meeting Abril, and the early success of the hand-woven products, and how those products helped MasayaCo stand out.
Aram: Around 2012, we had a hotel job in San Juan del Sur, and one of my friends wanted a woven chair. At the same time, I had just started dating Abril, who is from the town of Masaya. Masaya is an artisan town where every neighborhood has a different craft. There's a hammock neighborhood, a furniture neighborhood, a shoe-making neighborhood. When I met Abril, she was actually making sandals out of leather and woven cord. I had this hotel job. We were making the wooden frames out of wood we'd harvested from the hurricane, and I was taking them to Masaya to get them woven, kind of using it as an excuse to call up Abril and hang out with her. She would take me around town and we'd find the hammock-weaving neighborhood, and that's how we started making some of these chairs. She asked that we leave the chairs at her house, and she started playing around with the design, having the hammock weavers come over to her house. The original chair we were doing was solid, just one color. She started playing around and adding some of these colorful patterns to the woven chairs, and that's kind of where that first key product for us was born. From there, my brother Justin was living in New York and had the idea of putting the chairs on Etsy. That was around 2014. We put the chairs on Etsy and they started selling pretty quickly, and that's kind of where the brand came from for MasayaCo. And still, the woven chairs are one of our most popular products. Now we do a full line of teak furniture: dining room, bedroom, everything.
One of MasayaCo's handwoven chairs. Still a signature product more than a decade after Abril developed the first one.
From furniture to Masaya Homes and prefab construction.
Flavs: And then what led you to expand from furniture into Masaya Homes and prefab construction?
Olin: I had worked with Aram at the factory from around 2010, after he'd already gotten into the reforestation projects and was reclaiming the wood from the hurricane. He'd moved operations from the Atlantic coast to the capital city of Managua, and I was working with him. At that point it was just a sawmill on a lumber yard. I remember when I started there in 2010, we had 15 or so employees moving big timbers around in the yard and milling, and we were exporting lumber. But by 2013 we were up to probably around 100 employees at the facility. And that's right around when Aram and Abril started getting into more of the value-added product. I broke off at that point and started my own construction company in Nicaragua. I come from a construction background, my dad is a builder, I grew up around it. From 2013 to 2017 I was building houses in Nicaragua, using some of the lumber from the hurricane, and I was also dismantling old, abandoned haciendas in Nicaragua and using a lot of the reclaimed wood to build houses. Then in 2017, there was a huge fire in Sonoma County, the Tubbs Fire, that burned thousands of homes, and a builder friend of mine reached out to see if I was interested in coming up to California to help him with the fire rebuilds as a project manager. At that point I had a young family, and I was looking at getting my girls into school in California and reconnecting with the community here, and I also felt a pull to help rebuild my community where I grew up. So I moved up to California in late 2017 and really got a master's class in construction here. I'd grown up around it, but most of my construction experience was in Nicaragua, which is a lot different. Working with Tom Snyder, Snyder Construction, we rebuilt around 25 homes here in Sonoma County, doing everything from design to permitting to construction. And during that time, I was always in touch with Aram about our sort of panelized prefab idea that goes back decades. We'd built some small houses in Padre Ramos when we were living there, and we'd had this idea that, hey, let's try to use the reforested teak for a panelized construction system that could apply.
Aram: Yeah, furniture actually doesn't use that much wood. So talking to Olin and hearing about what he was working on up there, the idea of making houses out of reforested wood was just a way to drive more reforestation and use more of this material, which is 50 percent captured carbon. So it was kind of looking at what he was doing, plus, as he said, trying to incorporate the reforestation and products built from reforested material all the way through to this wonderful product delivered in the US.
Olin: Right. So some of my takeaways from working in the industry here was the construction waste I saw on a daily basis. You're driving around these communities that are all being rebuilt, and builders are moving fast because they have to, trying to get folks back into their homes. And every project has a dumpster parked out in front, and just massive amounts of waste. I'd take trailers to the dump, and a lot of the materials could have been used more efficiently. So as I'm watching this, I'm thinking, all right, how can we use a factory-built hybrid process using reforested, sustainably grown teak? We started playing around with this panelized system, engaged a structural engineer friend, and came up with a system where every single component of our homes is panelized: built at the factory, everything built to size, pre-assembled, then taken apart and flat-packed and shipped. So we've reduced the waste significantly, as well as the time that goes into a construction project. We started with a small studio office unit, built a couple of prototypes, and have since expanded our product line. We're now offering up to 1,500 square foot single-family residential, as well as smaller units used for backyard homes and accessory dwelling units.
Aram: Another huge factor is installation time. These small units can be installed in a week or so if it's just a small studio, and we can do a full two-bedroom home in under two months. So another huge savings in terms of environmental impact is that we're only in your backyard for four to eight weeks, rather than a normal construction site, where all the different trades are driving back and forth over a six to nine month period. So the time factor is a huge part of efficiency and sustainability.
The homeowner journey with a Masaya Home.
Flavs: So what does the journey look like for a homeowner when they're building a Masaya home?
Olin: We start with a site assessment. We go to the property, assess the existing conditions, and look at the permitting requirements. Once we're engaged, one of the benefits, and I talk to homeowners all the time about this, is that with a custom home, you're going to spend six months to a year, or sometimes more, just on design: working with an architect, a structural engineer, getting all the documentation ready for submittal. Our units are all pre-designed and pre-engineered, so on that front end we can be submitting for a permit within a month of going into contract. We still need to put together a site plan, and depending on the project, sometimes bring in outside consultants, but if it's not a tricky site, we do all the design and engineering in-house and can submit for the permit ourselves. Another benefit is that while the project is in permitting, and that timeline varies by jurisdiction, ADUs, accessory dwelling units, are streamlined in California. During permitting, we can start construction at the factory: build all the components, pre-assemble everything, all the interior millwork, doors, cabinets, very high-end finishes, all pre-finished and ready to ship. So by the time the permit is approved, we start the site work and foundation, which we also do in-house. We have a construction crew throughout California who can do all of the site work and foundation while the unit is shipping. It takes about three to six weeks to ship from our factory to the site, and once the components are on site, as Aram mentioned, we can install the structural components in a couple of weeks, get the building closed in and weather-tight, and then work on all the interiors, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, on site. We work with the jurisdiction on inspections, and it's fully turnkey. In conventional construction, homeowners are often working separately with architects, structural engineers, civil engineers, soils engineers, and landscape architects. We coordinate all of that through permitting, and we also have our own construction crew doing the site work and foundation installation, fully turnkey. We also offer a very nice furniture package from the MasayaCo line as well. So it's a fully turnkey operation.
A Masaya Home. Panelized, factory-built from reforested teak, installed in weeks instead of months.
Seed to Seat: how purchases fund reforestation.
Flavs: And circling back, could you explain the connection between purchasing a Masaya home or MasayaCo furniture and how it funds your reforestation projects?
Aram: What we've seen on the reforestation side of things is that there was a big wave of reforestation projects in Central America from the early 2000s into around 2015. Basically, these projects were set up to grow trees and then ship them to Asia for manufacturing, or ship them to India, where there's huge demand for teak as logs. During my time here, I saw these projects rise up and then cool off and fail once they went into production. That's mainly because they're producing a commodity, logs, which relies on global shipping, brokers, and other factors out of the grower's control, and it ended up not being very profitable for the people carrying out these reforestation projects. For me, a key factor is that it has to be profitable in order to be scalable. What I learned from seeing that was: if you're going to plant sugarcane, you're not going to do it unless there's a sugar mill nearby. If you're going to raise cattle, you're not going to do it unless there's a slaughterhouse nearby. It's all about the added value. And in Nicaragua and Central America, there's very little wood processing. So what I saw was that we had to develop products specifically designed for reforested wood, and I think that's a key factor in making reforestation economically sustainable, so that more people do it. During our learning process, that was a huge epiphany: in order to really drive this, we have to have products made from reforested wood. Reforested wood could be an eight-year-old thinning log that honestly isn't what a normal manufacturer is looking for. It might have some knots, some more character in it, and those logs are hard to market. We design our products so they consume everything, from the eight-year thinnings all the way through to the final harvest. That's a key part of this Seed to Seat® business model, where we're growing all the way through to the finished product. That's kind of what it's all about.
"It has to be profitable in order to be scalable. If you're going to plant sugarcane, you're not going to do it unless there's a sugar mill nearby."— Aram Terry
What's next for MasayaCo and Masaya Homes.
Flavs: And what are your plans for the future?
Aram: We have a very diverse line of products already, everywhere from homes to wood furniture, so I think we're good on product line diversity. Now we're focused on scaling our operations. Right now we have a store in Berkeley, California that sells both our ADUs and our furniture, and we feel that's our model going forward. We want to be present in the communities where we work, especially for building homes. We have a retail showroom model where we show both products together, so we can build you a studio, build you a home, or just sell you a shower stool. But it's all coming from our plantations. That model, plus our e-commerce sales, is how we see growing moving forward. We also have stores in Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua, so our growth going forward is in the US through ADUs and furniture, and down here in Nicaragua in terms of the reforestation, creating the demand for the wood so we can drive more of it.
Olin: On the home side, some exciting things: our prototype was a 120 square foot backyard office unit, and as we've grown, we've seen demand for bigger models. We've developed a 1,200 square foot model that can serve as an ADU, since that's the max ADU size in California, but it's also designed as a single-family residential. And we've now developed a 1,500 square foot model that's more appropriate for a single-family home. We have a handful of those in different phases of construction at the moment. We're also developing a Lat-Am line, models more appropriate for the tropical environment with more outdoor space, and we're growing into Costa Rica and Panama on the home side as well. For me, the most fulfilling part of what I do is really marrying my Nicaraguan life with my California life, and being able to work with really talented, motivated, smart Nicaraguan professionals across design, manufacturing, shipping, logistics, marketing, and finance. It's a pleasure to work with them and to connect them with my construction community here, and to see the progression of this thing as we've grown, and to be able to help our clients. We've had really great clients who are blown away by the product we're able to deliver at a very competitive price, who are also motivated by the sustainability of our product and can see the efficiencies. It's been a great experience for me and my family to be involved in this company.
Flavs: Aram and Olin, thank you for your work to create sustainable products and contribute to reforestation, and thank you for joining this episode of Climate Changers.
Aram and Olin: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Related reading from the MasayaCo journal.
Inside MasayaCo's Teak Reforestation Program. An on-the-ground look at what planting and managing more than 1,300 acres in Nicaragua actually involves, with forest managers Noel and Bryan Lopez.
Growing with the Grain: Khurland Lopez on Shaping Design. The craft and design side of the story, with the Nicaraguan artisans and designers who shape every piece by hand.
What FSC Certification Actually Means for Solid Teak. The chain of custody, why plantation-grown teak is different from old-growth, and how to verify a supplier's claims yourself.
Seed to Seat®. MasayaCo's program page, with more on the reforestation model, the trees planted, and the land under active management.
By MasayaCo Editorial, based on the Climate Changers podcast with Aram Terry and Olin Cohan.