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Simone Luna Louise Söderlund Giertz (/ˈjɛtʃ/ YETCH;[1] Swedish: [ˈjæʈːʂ]; born November 1, 1990) is a Swedish inventor, maker, robotics enthusiast, TV host, and professional YouTuber.

Key Information

Early life

[edit]
Giertz's mother, Caroline Giertz, in 2013

Simone Luna Louise Söderlund Giertz[SG 1] was born on November 1, 1990,[SG 2] the youngest of three siblings. Her mother is television host Caroline Giertz, who worked on reality television programs about ghost hunting, and her father worked as a television producer. She was raised in a middle-class household in Saltsjö-Duvnäs [sv], Sweden (near Stockholm).[1] Giertz is a descendant of Lars Magnus Ericsson, founder of Ericsson.[SG 3]

In elementary school, Giertz was interested in woodworking.[1] She named the Disney cartoon character Gyro Gearloose as one of her earliest inspirations.[2]

At the age of 16, Giertz spent a year in China as an exchange student. She stayed in Hefei, where she learned basic Mandarin. During her stay, she also made an appearance on a Chinese sitcom. Her parents got divorced while she was in China, which she was informed of the day she returned. Three months later, she enrolled in a Swedish boarding school in Nairobi, where she learned Swahili. After graduating from high school, she returned to China, spending six months in Nanhai, Guangdong.[1] Giertz studied physics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a research university in Stockholm, but dropped out after a year.[3][4] In 2012, she became an editor for Sweden's official website, working on the Chinese-language version.[1]

Giertz was self-taught in robotics;[3][5] her interest in electronics began in 2013,[3] when she attended a friend's talk about hacking hardware.[6] The same year, she began studying advertising at a vocational school. To fulfill a curriculum requirement, she had an internship in San Francisco as a product designer at the engineering company Punch Through Design, where she worked on projects with Arduino microcontrollers.[1] After she quit her internship,[5] her US visa lapsed, and she returned to Sweden to live with her mother.[1] She also held brief jobs in technology journalism.[7]

Career

[edit]
Giertz in 2016

Early career and "Queen of Shitty Robots" (2015–2018)

[edit]

Giertz created her YouTube channel in March 2013.[8] Her first robot video was of a toothbrush helmet, posted on YouTube on August 2015.[1] She had made the robot for a children's show pilot on electronics, but she posted it online after the show was not picked up.[3] This seven-second video showed the helmet moving across her face without using toothpaste. She posted twelve more videos in 2015, featuring other robots inspired by everyday tasks, including one that electrically shocked her face while she read comments on her videos.[1]

Giertz's videos became popular on a subreddit called "Shitty Robots",[3][9] with one post becoming the subreddit's most popular of all time. She gained the nickname "Queen of Shitty Robots", which she began using herself.[10] Most of Giertz's early videos received hundreds of thousands of views,[1] including one that received 500,000 views within a day of being posted on Reddit. She also received tens of thousands of subscribers on Instagram.[3]

A video titled "The Breakfast Machine", posted in November 2015, was Giertz's first to feature a robotic arm.[11] In the video, it poorly pours milk and cereal, then holds up an empty spoon.[1][3] On November 11, she posted "The Wake-up Machine",[12] an alarm clock that slaps the user using a rubber hand that had originally been a Halloween decoration;[9][13] the video showed it tangling Giertz's hair.[3][7] She said this creation was "the first one that really took off".[3] "The Breakfast Machine" and "The Wake-up Machine" each received one million views.[11] In December 2015, she posted the "Chopping Machine", which used two knives to slice vegetables, in a video that parodied infomercials.[14] Other creations included a drone that cut the user's hair (tested on a mannequin),[1][15][16] a robot that used tongs and rubber hands to generate applause,[17][7] one that shampoos the user's hair,[3] and one that lifts up soup using 3D-printed parts.[18][19] Content creation became Giertz's full-time job by March 2016, at which point her YouTube channel had over 100,000 subscribers.[1]

Adam Savage in a workshop.
Giertz began working with Adam Savage's Tested.com in 2016.

Giertz's first video to become popular beyond YouTube was posted in February 2016. The video was six seconds long and showed a robot spreading lipstick across her face while she appeared focused on reading on a tablet. It received over one million views. Adam Savage, former presenter on the television program MythBusters, enjoyed the video and offered to collaborate with her.[1] Giertz then joined Savage's project Tested.com, collaborating on her first project with Savage, a helmet that feeds its wearer popcorn.[20] She created further videos exclusive to paid subscribers of the website.[1] Savage became a mentor to Giertz.[21] In a video posted a few months later, Giertz said she had "had the worst impostor syndrome" about working with Savage.[1]

Giertz showcased three of her robots on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in late 2016. Her appearance included using the lipstick robot on Colbert.[1] The same year, she hosted a video series by GoldieBlox, a toy company focused on teaching STEM to girls. Titled Toy Hackers, the seventeen-episode series featured Giertz alongside child YouTube stars.[22][23] In late 2016, she and German YouTuber Laura Kampf published a video in which they built "The Pussy Grabs Back Machine"—a reference to a comment by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump—that used a rubber hand to hit the groin of a person who grabbed the groin of the wearer. Giertz's sponsors disliked the video's profanity; in response, she deleted five videos,[1] and later published a profanity-filled video titled "Why My Sponsors are Leaving".[1][24] In December of that year, she created a Patreon account to receive money directly from viewers, while announcing a deal with GoldieBlox to release child-appropriate edits of her videos.[1] It released these edits under the title Scrappy Robots with Simone Giertz.[25]

In a video posted in December 2016, Giertz created a "butt wiping machine", which used a power drill to forcefully spin a roll of toilet paper.[26][27] Her robots posted in 2017 included a robot arm that placed down a glass and poured beer[28] and a drone that could carry a baby.[29][21] In 2017, she hosted the comedy TV show Manick with Nisse Hallberg on Swedish TV6. The basic premise of the show is that the hosts invent funny creative solutions to everyday problems.[citation needed] After getting an American driving license in 2017,[30] Giertz drove a Comuta-Car—a yellow electric car from the 1970s—which she called Cheese Louise as it resembled a cheese wedge.[1] In a February 2018 video, Giertz featured maker YouTuber William Osman, who modified the car to function as a computer mouse, with a video on Osman's channel explaining the process.[31][32]

Shift toward serious content (2018–2021)

[edit]

Increase in production value and astronaut training series

[edit]

Giertz experienced burnout around 2017 from working on too many projects at a time.[24] Around 2018, Giertz's YouTube videos increased in production value—having previously being made primarily by Giertz herself—but continued to mostly be about robots. These included a 22-minute video in which she hunted a robot, on which she credited dozens of people.[16] In April 2018, she created a six-minute video to promote season 2 of HBO's Westworld, in collaboration with advertising studio Portal A Interactive.[33] Based on the "host" robots in Westworld, she created a robot version of herself out of a medical dummy, and she recreated a scene of the character Dolores Abernathy.[34][35] The same year, Giertz presented at a TED conference. In her twelve-minute presentation, she encouraged useless ideas and described how her creations had helped her overcome performance anxiety. She illustrated her ideas by presenting her own projects and robots, including one that fed her water while she presented.[15][16][36]

Giertz attempted to train herself to go to space in a 2017 video series.[15] This included a video titled "I Locked Myself in My Bathroom for 48 Hours", which was intended to simulate the isolation of a spaceship.[1][15] It became her most viewed video, with 7.5 million views by April 2018.[8] In the last video of the series, she rode a zero-gravity aircraft. By the end of the year, Giertz was in talks with a production company to make a series about her going to space;[1] she hoped to be the first to create a show from space.[15] She decided to cancel the production as she felt she was not as passionate about it as she had expected.[SG 4]

Brain tumor

[edit]
External videos
YouTube logo
video icon I have a brain tumor.

In April 2018, an MRI scan and subsequent emergency room visit diagnosed Giertz with a noncancerous brain tumor—a 4.6-centimeter-wide, grade-1 meningioma—in her right eye.[1][24] It had become swollen about a year earlier,[1] but she had assumed it was an allergic reaction until it began aching.[24] She soon named the tumor Brian, as an anagram of brain.[37] She announced it in a five-minute YouTube video posted on April 30, one week after her diagnosis.[21] In this video, she both cried and made jokes about her diagnosis[1]—including a joke about the tumor being the size of a golf ball while she "[doesn't] even like golf"[1][21][8]—and she said that her "morbid sense of humor"[15] was "the only way I know how to deal with this".[15][37] It received over three million views within nine months.[21] At the time of the video, she had over 900,000 subscribers.[8]

In a tweet prior to her surgery, Giertz joked that she was sending an eviction notice to her tumor.[21][38][39] Giertz posted a minute-long video at a hospital on the day of her surgery,[1][16] on May 30, 2018. She continued to post humorous and upbeat accounts of her post-surgery progress, including photos of her "super villain scar".[21][38] Vlogger Charles Trippy, who had previously undergone brain surgery, replied that he and Giertz had "matching scars".[39] After her recovery, Giertz resumed posting vlogs in July.[24][40] She sent a part of the removed tumor to Antarctica,[15] posting a photo of it on Instagram on February 4, 2019. Although Giertz had cancelled an earlier project in Antarctica due to her health, the glass slide with her tumor was brought to Antarctica by her friend, documentarian Ariel Waldman, who placed it near Canada Glacier.[21][37]

Giertz reported that her tumor had returned in a January 2019 tweet, followed by a YouTube video.[41] It was in a part of her brain on which surgery was infeasible, so she was prescribed eight weeks of radiation therapy.[41][42] She said in this video, "The campaign for 2018 with surgery was to evict Brian. And now, for 2019, we're going to burn Brian."[1][15] She began selling t-shirts depicting her brain on Teespring.[1] Discussing her health became the largest subject of her channel. As she said to The Washington Post in March 2019, this change "kind of pushed me to think of YouTube differently," and she began documenting various things that interested her beyond robots. By this time, she had reached over 1.5 million subscribers.[15] After a course of radiation treatments,[1] Giertz described her ordeal and presented a project which converted her head alignment mask into an artwork (a lamp).[30] In a July 2019 Patreon post, Giertz stated that she had abandoned the concept of the "shitty robots" as it was no longer something she wanted to do and she felt that the joke had played out.[1]

Truckla

[edit]
External videos
YouTube logo
video icon I TURNED MY TESLA INTO A PICKUP TRUCK

In June 2019, Giertz documented a project in which she and collaborators—Kampf, Rich Benoit of the car YouTube channel Rich Rebuilds, and mechanic Marcos Ramirez—had converted a Tesla Model 3 into a pickup truck, which was named Truckla.[43][44][45] She posted a 31-minute video describing the build process, which received eight million views within ten days.[1] It was accompanied by a parody commercial directed by Jacquelyn Marker,[45] with the slogan, "Available nowhere."[44][46]

Giertz described Truckla as "the smartest or the most stupid thing I'm ever going to do."[43][45][46] She built the truck in response to wanting both an electric vehicle to avoid having a gas car and a pickup truck for practical reasons.[30][43] She did not want to wait for the proposed Tesla pickup that had been discussed for years.[43][47] She explained that she was motivated by genuine interest:[30][43]

My goal is to never own a gas car. I'm part of a new generation that will only drive electric. I feel like I should pad this a bit, but I'm not going to. Fuck oil companies. Seriously, fuck them.
...
I really hope that people don’t just think of this as an obnoxious YouTuber cutting up a brand new car. This process has destructive steps but the end goal is constructive. And I’m doing it because I really, really want this car. This is truly my dream car.

— Press release by Simone Giertz

Intending to complete the project in autumn 2018,[44] Giertz's initial plan was to attach the front of the Model 3 to a flatbed, but she chose a more complicated project to maintain the visual appeal of the car,[1] which took a year of planning and design work.[43] The final design resembled the Chevrolet El Camino.[43][44][46] Giertz worked on the project during her radiation treatments, which caused further delays.[44] Giertz's team purchased a new Model 3 and cut through the side with the back seat, removing the roof, doors, windows, and gaskets,[48][46] before welding it onto a flatbed from a Ford F-150 and a roof rack from a GMC Canyon.[48] They faced difficulties as the car's anti-damage programming activated,[43][49] and it required additional reinforcement.[44][46][49] Although the final vehicle was functional, Giertz said it required additional work such as waterproofing and repainting.[30][44][48] Giertz addressed Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the vlog, issuing a challenge for him to complete Tesla's official pickup truck,[45][47] and saying, "Tweet at me, Elon. I'll give you a ride in Truckla."[45][48]

Truckla received coverage in mainstream media sources and increased Giertz's fame.[50] The project's style was different from her previous work; The Verge described it as "a whole new world of DIY",[43] while Wired said her creation of a large, useful project was "a turning point".[44] Musk watched the video, and Giertz was subsequently invited to the unveiling of Tesla's Cybertruck.[1] In her video about the event, Giertz reacted to Musk's reveal of the truck with a shocked expression.[51][52] Giertz posted another video on Truckla in March 2023—the fourth anniversary of the project—in which she took the truck to a workshop where Ramirez and Ross Huber finished work on the car, including making it watertight and completing the tailgate. The video also showed her developing a prototype for a charging station compatible with Truckla, in collaboration with Viam Labs, which she called Chargla.[50][53][54]

Every Day Calendar, build videos, and other appearances

[edit]

As Giertz shifted away from intentionally "shitty" robots, she began designing products to sell.[55] She reflected in a June 2022 interview with Fast Company, "I'm a recovering self-deprecator. It's such a defense mechanism on the internet as well—like, the way you survive being an online creator is beating everyone to the joke and to the insult. I've been really trying to practice not talking myself down and talking down my skills."[55] Her first commercial release[9] was the Every Day Calendar, a habit-tracking product designed by her and four collaborators.[15] Giertz had originally built the project for herself, as she had begun engaging in meditation and yoga after her surgery and wanted to do these habits daily,[21][24] before designing another version that could be sold at scale.[56] It consisted of a wooden-framed printed circuit board with hexagonal capacitive sensing buttons that light up an LED for each day of the year.[21][56][57][58] She launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign for the calendar in October 2018; initially aiming to raise $35,000, she ultimately received $593,352 from over two thousand donors.[15][21] She also published open-source schematics for the product to be made by others.[57] Production began around December 2019.[1] The product was later sold by other vendors, including the Museum of Modern Art Design Store.[9]

Giertz was a Featured Creator at VidCon 2019.[59] Giertz featured vlogger Hannah Hart in a September 2019 video, in which the two attempted to eat a meal with a leaf blower blowing in their faces.[60] In June 2020, Giertz voiced a cartoon robot named CGO in Adventure Time: Distant Lands.[61][62] She also participated in a 2021 educational campaign by menstrual product company Kotex, making a mechanical model of menstruation.[63]

After Giertz purchased a house in 2020, several of her YouTube videos featured projects for her home.[64] In an October 2020 video sponsored by Lego, she used Lego Mindstorms pieces to construct a photo booth for her dog, Scraps, dispensing a dog treat whenever she pressed the button to take a photograph.[65][66] A short version of the video on Giertz's Twitter account [67] A March 2021 video documented her modelling and building a chair with a seat for Scraps to sit beside her, motivated by the dog's desire to sit on top of her.[68][69][70] In September 2021, she built a table topped with tambour panels that could be rolled back to store jigsaw puzzle pieces inside.[71][72]

Yetch Store (2022–present)

[edit]
Wordmark of the word "Yetch" with an asterisk, in a heavy black font
2025 logo of Yetch Studio

In May 2022, she started the Yetch Store, a product design company with an online shop.[73] The company's name is a phonetic spelling of her surname.[55][9] Yetch was announced in a YouTube video titled, "Is this the world's worst jigsaw puzzle". The video demonstrated the company's first product, the Incomplete White Puzzle, a completely white puzzle that appears to have one piece missing; she took nineteen hours to complete it.[64][73] Upon the company's launch, it sold three other products: the Every Day Calendar as well as two rings, one with a screwdriver and one with a screw head.[73] Giertz later made a YouTube video describing the difficulty of manufacturing and shipping these rings.[74] In November 2023, Giertz led a Kickstarter campaign for a clothes hanger that folded to save space, called the Coat Hinger.[75] The Kickstarter campaign earned over $60,000[76] and the product was sold on the Yetch Store.[77]

In 2023 and 2024, Giertz's YouTube videos featured creations such as a robot arm made of stained glass,[78] a box that shreds a message once opened,[79] a pasta extruder made to resemble facial hair on a mannequin head,[80] a hat that unzips into a tote bag,[81] a motorized skateboard made of Lego Technic parts for her dog to skateboard,[82] and—collaborating with Kampf—a pair of safety goggles that functions as a ruler.[83] In a December 2024 Instagram Reel, Giertz showed a chair designed to rotate on a lazy Susan surrounded by a rack, allowing it to hold dirty clothing. After the chair went viral, Giertz stated plans to sell it as a Yetch product.[77][84] During the 2025 Cairo Maker Faire, Giertz posted a collaboration with Dina Amin, altering a flip clock to track moon phases.[85]

Style

[edit]

Giertz releases videos without a regular schedule, with some being months apart. As of 2019, she also posts regularly on Patreon, which includes both videos and text posts.[1] Her videos frequently include swearing,[16][24][86] deadpan humor,[8][24] and self-deprecation.[21] She has often worn jumpsuits and filmed in front of turquoise walls across multiple filming locations.[24] Giertz has described her audience as overwhelmingly male and mostly in the age range of 25 to 34.[87]

Giertz's "shitty robot" videos employ deadpan humor to demonstrate mechanical robots of her own creation to automate everyday tasks; despite working from a purely mechanical standpoint, they often fall short of practical usefulness, for comic effect.[5][16] When building her robots, Giertz would often not aim to make something useful, instead coming up with excessive solutions to potentially automatable situations.[10] Aviva Rutkin of New Scientist compared Giertz's robots that intentionally failed with a widespread phenomenon of robots that were designed for serious tasks but failed.[10] Giertz began each project with a sketch, followed by a computer model, before ordering materials.[3] Several of her robots were made using a servomotor and an Arduino controller, including "The Wake-up Machine", "The Chopping Machine",[14] and the shampoo robot.[88] Giertz has said that her "shitty robot" videos had been a way to avoid her perfectionism and fear of failure.[1][9][21]

As Giertz shifted away from "shitty robots", she described her content as a "journal of personal interest".[15][87] She did not focus on educational value as she felt that such content was already done by other YouTubers.[87] In a 2019 Wired piece, Lauren Goode noted that, despite Giertz's reputation for "shitty robots", her three most popular videos were more purpose-driven: the Truckla build, followed by the bathroom isolation and zero-gravity aircraft videos.[1]

Reception and influence

[edit]

Thomas Johnson of The Washington Post wrote that Giertz's appeal stems from a vicarious feeling of "pure delight", and that comments on her videos are "uncommonly wholesome". Johnson noted that Giertz contrasted with scientific presenters on mainstream media, as her humor was more profane, as well as with other science-themed YouTubers, as her video subjects were not based on learning.[16] Writing for The Spectator in 2018, Ian Sansom called Giertz the best maker YouTuber, comparing her to cartoonist Heath Robinson as well as the character Wallace from Wallace and Gromit.[86] BBC News's Patrick Evans also compared Giertz's robots to Wallace and Gromit.[37] According to Eliza Strickland of IEEE Spectrum, Giertz's inventions exemplify economist Eric von Hippel's theory of user innovation, as they are designed for personal needs rather than scalability.[89]

In the 2019 Wired piece, Savage said of Giertz's early videos, "There's something so subversive and yet loving about technology at the same time".[1] He also told Vice Magazine that Giertz was "her own subject matter ... Nobody else was in quite the same space."[21] Quoted in a 2019 Washington Post article, YouTuber Dianna Cowern said Giertz had "an instinctual sense" for her creativity and humor.[15] One of Giertz's creations, a musical instrument made of chattering teeth, inspired artist Love Hultén's 2020 creation of a similar instrument controlled by a synthesizer.[90][91]

Awards and honors

[edit]

Giertz was nominated for the Streamy Award in the Technology category in 2020,[92] then in the Science and Engineering category in 2021[93] and 2022.[94] Her Westworld collaboration was also nominated for the 2018 Streamy for Branded Content: Video.[95] At the Streamy Awards, she was a finalist in the STEM category in 2017,[96] and the her Kotex advertisement received the Audience Honor Award in Education in 2022.[97] Giertz has an honorary doctorate from the University of Skövde, received in 2025.[4]

Personal life

[edit]
Giertz's dog, Scraps

Giertz lived on a houseboat in Stockholm from 2012 to 2016.[5][SG 5] She moved to San Francisco in 2016, when she began working with Tested.com,[3] and set up a workshop in there in 2018, after her brain surgery.[21][24] She bought a house in Los Angeles in 2020.[64][SG 6] She lives with Scraps,[65] a three-legged dog born in 2019 or 2020.[69]

Giertz has said she strongly identifies as atheist or agnostic.[21][SG 7] Wired's Goode wrote that Giertz was "mostly vegan",[1] and Giertz stated that she is a vegan in an interview on the Mythical Kitchen YouTube channel posted in January 2025.[SG 7]

References

[edit]
[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Simone Giertz

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia
Simone Giertz is a Swedish inventor, YouTuber, and entrepreneur based in Los Angeles, best known for her humorous and intentionally imperfect robotic inventions, which she dubs "shitty robots," and for founding the product design company Yetch in 2022.[1][2] Born and raised in Sweden by creative parents, Giertz developed an early interest in building, such as transforming a satellite dish into a chair at age nine, and was a straight-A student before dropping out of a physics degree program due to performance anxiety.[3][4] Self-taught in electronics and engineering after working at a tech company in the Bay Area, she returned to Sweden to focus on her projects, launching her YouTube channel in 2013 with short videos like the viral Toothbrush Helmet that quickly amassed millions of views.[3][1] Her channel, which now has over 2.8 million subscribers and more than 200 million total views as of 2025, features a mix of comedic failures and practical innovations, including the soup-serving robot, a robotic makeup arm, and the custom-built Tesla pickup truck called Truckla, emphasizing her philosophy that embracing imperfection fosters creativity and reduces the fear of failure.[5][1][3] In 2018, Giertz publicly shared her diagnosis and successful surgery for a non-cancerous brain tumor, which influenced a shift toward more personal and reliable designs, such as the Every Day Calendar—a habit-tracking tool that raised over $500,000 on Kickstarter.[2][1] Beyond YouTube, Giertz has delivered a TED Talk on the value of creating "useless" things, and continues to develop products through Yetch, including items like a ring-screwdriver and a jigsaw puzzle with a deliberately missing piece, while exploring new media projects such as a self-funded TV pilot.[2][2] In 2025, she received an honorary doctorate in informatics from the University of Skövde for her contributions to invention and robotics enthusiasm.[6]

Early life

Family background

Simone Giertz was born on November 1, 1990, in Stockholm, Sweden.[7] She is the youngest of three siblings and the daughter of television host Caroline Giertz, known for her work as a paranormal investigator on the Swedish reality series Det okända, and a television producer who later transitioned to media licensing.[8][9] Giertz grew up in the affluent suburb of Saltsjö-Duvnäs, approximately 6 miles east of central Stockholm, in a comfortable middle-class household without extravagant luxuries such as luxury vehicles or vacation homes.[8] Her family environment emphasized self-sufficiency, particularly in contrast to her older siblings.[8] Giertz descends from Lars Magnus Ericsson, the Swedish inventor and founder of the telecommunications giant Ericsson, as her great-great-great-grandfather.[10] Her parents' deep involvement in the Swedish media industry—through hosting, production, and paranormal programming—exposed her from a young age to the worlds of television creation and storytelling, fostering an early familiarity with content production techniques.[8][9]

Education and early travels

Giertz grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, and attended high school in both Sweden and Kenya. She spent a significant portion of her teenage years abroad, beginning with a year-long exchange program in Hefei, China, at the age of 16, where she learned basic Mandarin and appeared in a Chinese sitcom.[8][6] This experience immersed her in a new cultural and linguistic environment, fostering independence and adaptability during her high school years. Her parents' divorce occurred while she was in China, and upon returning, she attended a Swedish boarding school in Nairobi, Kenya, to learn Swahili.[8] These travels contributed to her self-directed approach to learning, as she began exploring technical interests without structured guidance. After returning to Sweden, Giertz enrolled in a physics program at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, a leading research university focused on engineering and natural sciences.[6] She attended for one year but dropped out due to performance anxiety and finding the program too difficult.[6] This experience highlighted her growing disinterest in traditional academic paths in the sciences. In 2013, Giertz shifted her focus to more creative and applied fields by enrolling at Hyper Island, a Stockholm-based business school specializing in digital creative disciplines. There, she studied advertising and digital marketing, honing skills in content creation and media strategy that later influenced her inventive work.[8] Throughout her education and travels, Giertz remained largely self-taught in programming and mechanics, relying on online resources, trial-and-error experimentation, and real-world opportunities, without any formal training in robotics or engineering.[8][11]

Career

YouTube beginnings and robot inventions

Simone Giertz created her YouTube channel in March 2013, initially uploading content that garnered low viewership, such as personal vlogs and miscellaneous sketches that did not attract significant attention.[5] Her early videos focused on everyday topics without a defined niche, reflecting her nascent exploration of online content creation before pivoting to invention-based material.[12] In August 2015, Giertz marked a pivotal shift by releasing her first robot invention video, "The Toothbrush Helmet," which featured a motorized helmet equipped with a robotic arm and toothbrush designed to automate teeth brushing—though it performed poorly in practice.[13] This video, uploaded on August 7, introduced her audience to hands-on engineering experiments and quickly differentiated her channel from generic content.[14] It served as the foundation for her subsequent series of invention videos, emphasizing playful automation over practical utility. Giertz soon developed her signature "Queen of Shitty Robots" persona, embracing intentionally flawed machines that humorously attempted to solve mundane tasks but often failed spectacularly.[8] Exemplifying this approach, her 2015 "Breakfast Machine" video depicted a contraption meant to prepare and deliver breakfast, which instead created chaos by flinging food; it amassed over one million views within months of release.[15] Similarly, "The Wake-up Machine," also from 2015, portrayed an alarm clock that physically slapped the user awake with a foam arm, further solidifying her reputation for absurd, malfunctioning robotics.[16] Her video style evolved into short, self-deprecating narratives—typically under five minutes—that blended engineering mishaps with witty commentary on problem-solving in daily life.[11] Giertz narrated her builds with ironic enthusiasm, highlighting the joy in imperfection and encouraging viewers to experiment without fear of failure, which resonated widely in the maker community.[1] This format not only showcased her technical skills but also her comedic timing, turning potential frustrations into entertaining content. As of November 2025, Giertz's channel has 2.8 million subscribers and 204 million total views, driven largely by the enduring popularity of her early robot series.[5] She occasionally referenced potential collaborations, such as with maker Adam Savage, to expand her inventive scope beyond solo projects.[8]

Major projects and collaborations

One of Giertz's most ambitious projects is the "Truckla," a custom conversion of a Tesla Model 3 sedan into a functional pickup truck, completed in June 2019 after two weeks of intensive work in a rented workshop with the help of over a dozen collaborators. The build involved cutting the rear of the vehicle to create a flatbed, installing a roll cage for safety, and adding a tailgate that doubles as a workbench, resulting in a two-seater utility vehicle capable of daily driving. The accompanying YouTube video documenting the process has amassed over 13 million views, highlighting the project's blend of automotive engineering and inventive humor.[17][18][19] Giertz has maintained a longstanding collaboration with maker Adam Savage, beginning in 2016 through appearances and joint builds on Tested.com, the platform founded by Savage. Their partnership includes projects like a wearable popcorn-dispensing helmet constructed in a single day, showcasing Giertz's signature approach to overengineered, playful contraptions that integrate robotics with everyday absurdity. This ongoing relationship has extended to multiple video series and on-set visits, such as Giertz's appearance during the production of MythBusters Jr. in 2018, fostering a shared emphasis on hands-on fabrication and problem-solving.[20] In recent years, Giertz has focused on inventive builds that marry aesthetics with functionality, exemplified by her 2023 stained glass robot arm, a functional mechanical limb crafted from soldered panels inspired by solarpunk design principles. Using an existing metal arm as a template, she replaced structural components with translucent glass, creating a delicate yet operational device that demonstrates her interest in unconventional materials for robotics. This project underscores her evolution toward whimsical engineering solutions, such as automated tools that prioritize visual artistry alongside utility.[21][22] Further highlighting this style, Giertz collaborated with Egyptian maker Dina Amin at the 2025 Cairo Maker Faire to repurpose an antique flip clock into a moon phase tracker, incorporating custom mechanics to display lunar cycles using salvaged components from a local market. The device features rotating flip cards synchronized with astronomical data, serving as both a practical timepiece and an artistic nod to celestial observation. Similarly, in late 2024, she developed a rotating chair mechanism designed as a valet for "half-dirty" clothes, featuring a swivel arm on a lazy Susan base to organize limbo laundry in a compact, automated form. These inventions reflect Giertz's ongoing pursuit of practical yet delightfully eccentric automated furniture and tools that solve mundane problems through creative engineering.[23][24]

Television and speaking engagements

Giertz gained wider recognition through her television debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in September 2016, where she demonstrated several of her malfunctioning robots live, including a machine intended to apply lipstick, showcasing her humorous approach to invention.[8][25] In April 2018, Giertz delivered a TED talk titled "Why you should make useless things" at TED2018, in which she advocated for embracing failure in creation as a source of joy and learning, drawing from her experiences building impractical robots.[26] The talk, which highlighted the value of playful, non-utilitarian projects, has garnered over 4.6 million views.[26] Giertz has been featured extensively in media outlets, including multiple profiles in Wired magazine that explored her inventive process and robotic contraptions, such as a 2016 interview on her role as a comedic roboticist and a 2017 tour of her workshop.[27][28] She has also appeared at prominent tech events, including an invitation to Tesla's Cybertruck unveiling in November 2019, where her work intersected with automotive innovation.[8]

Business and product launches

In 2018, Simone Giertz launched her first major crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for the Every Day Calendar, a perpetual habit-tracking device featuring a hexagonal display with capacitive touch sensors and LEDs to mark daily accomplishments without requiring internet connectivity.[29] The project, which sought to create a simple, open-source tool for personal goal setting, exceeded its funding goal and raised $593,352 from 2,305 backers by the end of its 30-day campaign.[29] This success marked Giertz's entry into commercial product development, transitioning her inventive prototypes into marketable items.[30] Building on this momentum, Giertz founded Yetch Studio in 2022 as an online store dedicated to selling novelty gadgets and maker tools derived from her designs.[31] The platform offers items like the Incomplete White Puzzle, a 499-piece all-white jigsaw intentionally missing one piece to challenge perfectionists, priced at $38.[32] Other products include custom tools such as the Coat Hinger, a wall-mounted hook system for garments, reflecting Giertz's focus on quirky, functional solutions to everyday annoyances. In 2023, she launched a Kickstarter for the Coat Hinger, a patented foldable coat hanger, which became a staple product on Yetch.[33][34] Yetch emphasizes hands-on prototyping and limited production runs, positioning it as a direct extension of Giertz's creative process rather than mass-market merchandise.[35] Giertz has since expanded her product line through Yetch Studio and her personal website, incorporating furniture and gadgets inspired by her earlier projects, such as automated mechanisms for home use. Examples of recent inventions include a spinning coffee table and a motorized umbrella to shield outdoor furniture.[36][34] This evolution underscores her shift toward sustainable entrepreneurship, where inventions like the Every Day Calendar continue to influence broader offerings in habit aids and household innovations.[37]

Health challenges

Diagnosis

In early 2018, during a period of rapid growth in her YouTube career, Giertz noticed vision issues, including a persistently swollen right eyelid and recent onset of eye pain.[38] These symptoms prompted her to seek medical evaluation, leading to an MRI scan in late April 2018 that confirmed the presence of a noncancerous meningioma tumor, roughly the size of a golf ball.[38][39] The diagnosis temporarily interrupted her content creation, as she prepared for upcoming surgery.[38] On April 30, 2018, Giertz shared the news publicly through a candid YouTube video, opting for transparency to connect with her audience amid the uncertainty.[38]

Treatment and recovery

Giertz underwent surgery on May 30, 2018, to remove the golf ball-sized, non-cancerous brain tumor, a procedure that lasted approximately 8 to 12 hours and was performed at a hospital in San Francisco. Doctors successfully excised the majority of the tumor and expressed satisfaction with the results immediately following the operation.[40] In the months after surgery, Giertz documented her recovery through YouTube videos, infusing the process with her characteristic humor, such as displaying her resulting "super villain scar" and reflecting on physical limitations like temporary balance issues. She incorporated yoga and meditation into her routine to support rehabilitation, reporting no major cognitive alterations and feeling largely like her pre-surgery self. By late 2018, she had returned to work, setting up a new workshop in San Francisco and resuming inventive projects.[41][42] In January 2019, follow-up scans indicated regrowth of a small remnant left behind during surgery due to its proximity to critical brain areas, prompting a course of preventive radiation therapy over six weeks, from late January to early March. The treatment involved daily sessions using a custom mesh mask to immobilize her head, which she later repurposed into LED art as part of her video documentation. Side effects included a diminished sense of taste for salt and a persistent euphoric sensation, addressed in part by prophylactic medication typically used for Alzheimer's to counteract potential radiation-induced cognitive risks.[43][44] Giertz continued sharing her radiation experiences via YouTube, blending updates on physical therapy for fatigue and minor adjustments with lighthearted commentary to maintain audience engagement. She fully resumed her career post-treatment, launching the Every Day Calendar Kickstarter in February 2019, which exceeded its funding goal. No major tumor recurrences have been reported as of 2025, allowing her to sustain ongoing professional endeavors.[41][6]

Honours and recognition

Awards and nominations

Simone Giertz has been recognized with multiple nominations at the Streamy Awards for her innovative YouTube content blending engineering and humor. In 2020, she was nominated in the Technology category for her inventive videos showcasing quirky robots and gadgets.[45] She received a nomination in the Science & Engineering category in 2021, highlighting her hands-on demonstrations of mechanical projects.[46] This was followed by another Science & Engineering nomination in 2022, acknowledging her continued contributions to educational and entertaining tech content.[47] Giertz has also earned accolades at the Shorty Awards for her tech innovations. In 2017, she was a finalist in the STEM category for her social media presence promoting science, technology, engineering, and math through accessible and fun inventions.[48] In 2022, she won a Bronze award for the "Kotex SheCan Initiative: The Menstruation Machines," a collaborative project using her robotic expertise to raise awareness about menstrual equity.[49]

Academic and professional honors

In 2025, Simone Giertz received an honorary doctorate in Informatics from the University of Skövde, recognizing her pioneering contributions to robotics and her role in inspiring education through accessible and engaging content creation.[6] The award, conferred during the university's academic ceremony on March 21, highlighted her use of humor, perseverance, and inventiveness to demonstrate that failures are integral to technological learning and positive development.[6] It specifically acknowledged her ability to make complex technology enjoyable and approachable for a global audience via her YouTube channel, which has nearly three million subscribers.[6] Giertz is professionally recognized in tech and maker communities as an inventor, robotics enthusiast, product designer, television host, and entrepreneur, titles that underscore her impact on innovative engineering and design.[50] She is widely known by the moniker "The Queen of Shitty Robots," a designation celebrating her humorous yet influential inventions, such as malfunctioning yet educational robotic devices that blend creativity with practical problem-solving.[6]

Personal life

Residences and lifestyle

Giertz resided on a renovated houseboat in Stockholm, Sweden, from her early twenties until 2016, transforming a 1940s tugboat into her unconventional home.[11] In mid-2016, she relocated to San Francisco, California, to collaborate on robotics projects and expand her inventive work.[51] By 2020, Giertz had moved to Los Angeles, California, where she continues to live as of 2025 in a compact 58-square-meter one-bedroom bungalow designed for efficiency and creativity.[52] This relocation was influenced in part by her health recovery needs.[2] In May 2020, shortly after her recovery, she adopted Scraps, a three-legged rescue dog who shares the home and often features in her daily routines.[53] Giertz's lifestyle prioritizes small-space ingenuity, with her bungalow functioning as a multifunctional "lean machine" that balances rest and productivity.[52] She integrates a dedicated maker workspace into the home layout, complete with custom tools and inventions such as a mechanical fruit bowl and storage-optimized furniture, reflecting her hands-on approach to daily living.[54]

Interests and beliefs

Giertz follows a vegan diet, which she maintains as part of her daily lifestyle.[8][55] She identifies as a "hardcore agnostic," expressing skepticism toward prayer and religious practices while appreciating supportive gestures from others.[41] Among her hobbies, Giertz enjoys reading as a way to unwind and explore creative ideas, alongside practices like yoga and meditation to support mental well-being.[8] She also engages in outdoor activities such as camping, often incorporating her dog into these experiences.[56] Additionally, she continues tinkering with non-professional builds, such as personal habit-tracking devices, to satisfy her innate curiosity outside of content creation.[29] In her worldview, Giertz emphasizes the value of imperfection and intentional failure as pathways to genuine creativity, viewing "shitty" experiments as liberating rather than discouraging. This philosophy, echoed in her public talks, underscores her belief that perfection stifles innovation while embracing flaws fosters joy and progress.[8]

References

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  2. Meet Simone Giertz, the YouTube robotics star now running her own ...
  3. Meet Simone Giertz, the self-proclaimed Queen of Shitty Robots
  4. The Creator: Simone Giertz Interview - Red Bull
  5. Simone Giertz's YouTube Statistics - Social Blade
  6. Inventor Simone Giertz Honorary Doctor at the University of Skövde
  7. Simone Giertz - Age, Family, Bio | Famous Birthdays
  8. Why the 'Queen of Shitty Robots' Renounced Her Crown - WIRED
  9. Weekly smiles from the queen of useless robots - Robohub
  10. Building Robots with Simone Giertz at Ericsson San Francisco
  11. Meet the queen of useless robots: 'The internet is a weird place'
  12. Simone Giertz started with a punchline on YouTube. Now, she's ...
  13. The Toothbrush Machine - YouTube
  14. Let This Helmet with a Robot Arm (Sorta) Brush Your Teeth | Make:
  15. The Breakfast Machine - YouTube
  16. The Wake-up Machine TAKE #1 - YouTube
  17. I TURNED MY TESLA INTO A PICKUP TRUCK - YouTube
  18. Simone Giertz's converted Tesla Model 3 pickup truck is wonderful
  19. https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18682633/simone-giertz-tesla-model-3-pickup-truck-youtube-diy
  20. Adam Savage and Simone Giertz Make a Popcorn Machine!
  21. Making a robot out of stained glass was a stupid idea from the start
  22. Glass Robot From A Solarpunk Future - Hackaday
  23. Moon Phase Flip Clock Is Fantastic - Hackaday
  24. A clever solution to the clothes chair dilemma - InteriorDaily
  25. Simone Giertz is Queen of Crappy Robots - YouTube
  26. Simone Giertz: Why you should make useless things | TED Talk
  27. Meet YouTuber Simone Giertz: the mistress of malfunction - WIRED
  28. Tour Simone Giertz's Mad Laboratory of Hilariously Awful Robots
  29. The Every Day Calendar by Simone Giertz - Kickstarter
  30. YouTuber Simone Giertz launches her first Kickstarter campaign
  31. https://yetch.studio/pages/about-us
  32. https://yetch.studio/products/incomplete-white-puzzle
  33. https://yetch.studio/collections/shop-all
  34. Simone Giertz discusses the birth of her online store, Yetch
  35. Simone Giertz
  36. Simone Giertz's online store sells cool inventions 'you didn't know ...
  37. YouTube Creator Simone Giertz Reveals She Has a Brain Tumor
  38. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-47204326/
  39. Simone Giertz, creator of 'Shitty Robots,' undergoes surgery to ...
  40. Life After a Brain Tumor With Simone Giertz, the Queen of Shitty ...
  41. Back from brain surgery - YouTube
  42. Simone Giertz describes her radiation treatment while making some ...
  43. Simone Giertz Will Undergo Radiation Therapy To Treat Brain ...
  44. YouTube Streamy Awards Nominations Unveiled - Deadline
  45. Streamy Awards 2021 Nominations Announced - Deadline
  46. 12th Annual Winners - The Streamy Awards
  47. STEM in Social Media - The Shorty Awards
  48. 14th Annual Winners and Honorees - The Shorty Awards
  49. Simone Giertz: Inventor, entrepreneur & robotics enthusiast - Microsoft
  50. Robot queen Simone Giertz on inventions, the internet, and not ...
  51. “I'd Rather have Weird than Boring”: How Simone Giertz Lives Small
  52. YouTube Inventor Built Dog Selfie Photo Booth - People.com
  53. Inside Inventor Simone Giertz's Small Los Angeles Home ... - YouTube
  54. How I managed to meditate every day for a year - YouTube
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