The Woman Who Builds Everything
The first video Laura Kampf posted to YouTube had no voiceover. No music. No explanation. Just the sounds of her hands working a piece of walnut wood into a lamp. It was 2015. She posted it, went back to the workshop, and kept building. Ten years later, she still does exactly this - every single Sunday.
Right now she is in Los Angeles. She has a camper she bought for one dollar, and she is in the process of transforming it into a backyard accessory dwelling unit. The camper had problems she hadn't anticipated. She documented them anyway and posted the video. Her "Janitor of LA" series involves collecting discarded objects from Los Angeles streets and making them useful again. Both series are quintessential Kampf: the premise is absurd, the execution is meticulous, and the result looks genuinely beautiful.
What sets Kampf apart from the crowded field of maker-YouTubers is not the quality of the work, though the work is exceptional. It is the philosophy embedded in every cut. Her workshop in Cologne carried a phrase written across it: "Every defect gets respect." She brought that philosophy to Los Angeles and has been applying it to a city that generates extraordinary amounts of interesting trash.
"It is very satisfying to understand what it is that you really need and modify the things around you to fit your personal taste and lifestyle. Every object comes with a value - but you can redefine these values by modifying the object." - Laura Kampf
The Long Way to the Workshop
She grew up in Wiehl, a small town in the Bergisches Land region of Germany. At eight years old she asked for a Leatherman multi-tool as a gift. The inspiration was Data from "The Goonies" - the kid with all the gadgets. That request is either a funny anecdote or the entire story of Laura Kampf in miniature, depending on how you look at it.
She studied Communication Design at FH Dusseldorf, graduating in 2012. Before university she had done an apprenticeship as a media designer specializing in image and sound. The design education shows up in her work as a kind of visual precision - the camera angles in her videos, the composition of her shots, the way she frames both problems and solutions. She built her first machine during a university class: a tattoo machine that didn't work particularly well. She documented it anyway.
After graduation she worked as a camera assistant. It paid but didn't satisfy. She had started doing DIY work on the side, financing her early experiments by taking a job at a bar. In 2015, she posted that first wordless lamp video to YouTube. The following year, Popular Mechanics called her "a rising star among DIYers on YouTube." She quit everything else and made the channel her full-time job.
"The physical work of building something, that's a form of meditation. That's just my happy place." - Laura Kampf
Five Years in a Caravan
Here is the detail that tends to reframe everything else: for approximately five years, Laura Kampf sold her car and lived in a caravan parked outside her rented workshop in Cologne. This was a deliberate choice. It kept costs minimal, kept her close to the work, and demonstrated something about priorities that no amount of workshop tour video could convey. The workshop was the thing. Everything else was logistics.
That period produced some of her most-watched content. The 2019 beer keg bicycle sidecar video - in which she fabricated a sidecar for her bicycle entirely from a repurposed beer keg - accumulated millions of views and became the shorthand reference point for her work in wider internet circles. It has the quality of a joke whose punchline is that it actually works beautifully.
German Television and the Mouse
In 2017 she co-hosted "Schrott or Not" (Schrott & Co.) on KiKa, a German children's television channel. The following year she began hosting a segment called "Lauras Machgeschichten" (Laura's Making Stories) on "Die Sendung mit der Maus" - Germany's most beloved children's TV show, which has been running continuously since 1971. The show's format is built around explaining how things work, which is such an obvious fit for Kampf's sensibility that it is surprising it took until 2018.
That same sensibility has attracted collaboration partners who share it. She has worked with Simone Giertz - the Swedish "queen of shitty robots" turned serious machinist - on multiple projects, including an overengineered doorbell built in 2025. She has collaborated with Adam Savage, the MythBusters co-host who became a respected voice in making culture. These collaborations are not accidental: Kampf operates in a specific stratum of maker culture where engineering rigor meets intentional playfulness.
Awards and Recognition
In 2020 she won the Goldene Kamera Digital Award in the Best of Education & Coaching category. In 2021 a collaborative project called "Fire Up 2021" won the Webby Award People's Voice in Events & Live Streams (Branded). The awards are meaningful partly because the Goldene Kamera is Germany's oldest television award, and the Webby is the most prominent internet award - together they suggest a range of recognition that most creators in either medium don't achieve.
Los Angeles, 2024-
In 2024, Kampf married Corinne Brinkerhoff, an American TV writer and producer. She documented the move from Cologne to Los Angeles via road trip, with her dog Smudo - named after the rapper from German hip-hop group Die Fantastischen Vier - accompanying her. The new city has become material. The "Janitor of LA" series mines the specific texture of Los Angeles's street-level discards. The $1 camper project addresses LA's notorious housing economics from the angle of someone who once lived in a caravan and found it clarifying.
The channel now has over 845,000 subscribers and more than 108 million total views. She uploads every Sunday. She has done this for over a decade. It is not a streak she tracks for its own sake - it is simply what she does. The work is the point. The videos are the record of the work. The followers are welcome to watch.
"It almost feels like getting naked on a table when I post a video: so much of my personality is exposed." - Laura Kampf
That vulnerability is exactly what the channel runs on. The making is real, the problems are real, the satisfaction when something works is visible and infectious. What Kampf has built, over a decade of Sunday uploads, is not an audience but a workshop with an open door. Everyone who watches is in some sense standing at the threshold, watching someone do the thing they love with all the concentration it deserves.
