Simone Giertz

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

In elementary school, Giertz was interested in woodworking. Giertz felt obsessed with her grades in school

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. Giertz's interest in electronics began that year, To fulfill a curriculum requirement, Giertz 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. Giertz was self-taught in robotics,

Career Early career and "Queen of Shitty Robots" (2015–2018) Early videos and Tested.com

Giertz created her YouTube channel in March 2013. The first video on this channel, posted on September 15, 2014, showed Giertz in front of a wall, showcasing her creation of a popcorn catapult. It received little attention. Her second YouTube video and first robot-themed video was posted in August 2015, featuring a toothbrush helmet. This video went viral. She began posting more robots inspired by everyday tasks. an alarm clock that slapped the user by spinning a rubber hand that had originally been a Halloween decoration. She posted multiple versions of the video, In December 2015, she posted the "Chopping Machine", which used two knives to slice vegetables, in a video that parodied infomercials. Other creations included a drone that cut the user's hair (tested on a mannequin), and one that lifted up soup using 3D-printed parts. The short videos of her robots were accompanied by vlogs describing how they were designed. Content creation became Giertz's full-time job by March 2016, at which point her YouTube channel had over 100,000 subscribers. Most of Giertz's early videos received hundreds of thousands of views, often missing the mouth.

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,

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. Her robots posted in 2017 included a robot arm that placed down a glass and poured beer and a drone designed to carry a baby. After getting an American driving license in 2017,

Shift toward larger projects (2018–2021) Increase in production value and astronaut training series As her popularity increased, Giertz received sponsorships from large companies such as Ericsson, Google, and Audible. 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. The same year, Giertz presented at a TED conference. In her twelve-minute TED talk, she encouraged useless ideas and fun inventions,

By the end of 2019, Giertz was in talks with a production company to make a series about her going to space.

Brain tumor

In April 2018, an MRI scan and subsequent emergency room visit diagnosed Giertz with a noncancerous brain tumor—a -wide, meningioma—in her right eye. At the time of the video, she had over 900,000 subscribers on YouTube

In a tweet prior to her surgery, Giertz joked that she was sending an eviction notice to her tumor. Vlogger Charles Trippy, who had previously undergone brain surgery, replied that he and Giertz had "matching scars". After her recovery, Giertz resumed posting vlogs in July, and she set up a workshop in San Francisco in August.

Giertz reported that her tumor had returned in a January 2019 tweet, followed by a YouTube video. It was in a part of her brain on which surgery was infeasible, so she was prescribed eight weeks of radiation therapy. 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." After a course of radiation treatments,

Truckla

In June 2019, Giertz documented a project in which she and collaborators had converted a Tesla Model 3 into a pickup truck, which was named Truckla. The modifications were performed by her, Kampf, mechanic Marcos Ramirez, and YouTuber Rich Benoit, whose channel Rich Rebuilds often featured the modification of Teslas; several other friends were informally involved. She explained that she was motivated by genuine interest: They cut through the back of the car, removing the seats, roof, doors, windows, and gaskets, They had to hack into the car's programming as an anti-damage system prevented it from starting, and they had to add additional reinforcement. Although the final vehicle was functional, Giertz said it required additional work such as waterproofing and repainting. The project's style was different from her previous work; The Verge described it as "a whole new world of DIY", 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.

Every Day Calendar

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. She was also motivated by a desire for her career not to depend on YouTube. 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. 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.

Home-themed build videos and other appearances Giertz was a Featured Creator at VidCon 2019 and was profiled in a Wired cover story in December 2019. In June 2020, Giertz voiced a cartoon robot named CGO in Adventure Time: Distant Lands. She also participated in a 2021 educational campaign by menstrual product company Kotex, making a mechanical model of menstruation.

Giertz bought a house in Los Angeles in 2020, where she lives with her dog Scraps, A short version of the video on Giertz's Twitter account went viral, with over 100,000 likes. 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. In September 2021, she built a table topped with tambour panels that could be rolled back to store jigsaw puzzle pieces inside.

Yetch Store (2022–present)

In May 2022, Giertz started the Yetch Store, a product design company with an online shop. The company's name is a phonetic spelling of her surname. In November 2023, Giertz led a Kickstarter campaign for a clothes hanger that folded to save space, called the Coat Hinger. The Kickstarter campaign earned over $60,000 and the product was sold on the Yetch Store. a box that shredded a message once opened, a pasta extruder made to resemble facial hair on a mannequin head, a hat that unzipped into a tote bag, a motorized skateboard made of Lego Technic parts for her dog to skateboard, and—in a collaboration with Kampf—a pair of safety goggles that functioned as a ruler. 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. In 2026 she created a Kickstarter for the laundry chair. During the 2025 Cairo Maker Faire, Giertz posted a collaboration with Dina Amin, altering a flip clock to track moon phases.

Style Combining maker videos with comedy, Giertz's videos frequently include swearing, Giertz has said that her "shitty robot" videos had been a way to avoid her perfectionism and fear of failure. She did not focus on educational value as she felt that such content was already done by other YouTubers. 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. BBC News Patrick Evans also compared Giertz's robots to Wallace and Gromit.

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 business considerations. According to cultural theorist Cynthia Barounis, the "shitty robots" embody the ethos of the camp style, which finds artistic value in failure; Barounis writes that that the robots subvert the expectations of assistive technology, requiring Giertz to put work into something that does not help, and that they symbolize disability, being celebrated despite their inability to perform actions. According to technology writer Douglas Heaven, as well as historian Katia Pizzi, Giertz's work is the leading contemporary example of the useless machine, a type of artwork created by 20th-century artist Bruno Munari.

Awards and honors Giertz was nominated for the Streamy Award in the Technology category in 2020, then in the Science and Engineering category in 2021 and 2022. Her Westworld collaboration was also nominated for the 2018 Streamy for Branded Content: Video. At the Streamy Awards, she was a finalist in the STEM category in 2017, and her Kotex marketing campaign received the Audience Honor Award in Education in 2022. Giertz has an honorary doctorate from the University of Skövde, received in 2025.