‘You’re a girl?’ The duo taking on the male-dominated plastering world

In the early days of Kamp Studios, Kim Collins and Amy Morgenstern were barely making rent. Now they're a favorite of interior designers across the country

If there was a low point in the history of Kamp Studios, it had to have been the day in 2010 when Kim Collins and Amy Morgenstern found themselves lugging every single quarter, dime, nickel and penny they had scrounged up from their apartment to pour into a coin-counting machine at a Brooklyn branch of TD Bank. The women, then partners in both work and life, were barely making rent while trying to keep their plastering business afloat. We were practically the only customers in the bank and that machine was very, very loud," Collins says. It was mortifying." They used the $117 they collected that day to buy groceries.

Plasterwork is famously labor-intensive, messy and physically demanding - but these weren't the only factors that made getting a foothold in the homebuilding space challenging for Collins and Morgenstern. According to a 2024 survey by the construction workforce management platform Lumber, women make up 10% of the construction industry, and only 4% of on-site workers are women. With the exception of the interior designer or architect, who are sometimes women, we are usually the only women working on a job site," says Collins.