Simone Giertz

Simone Luna Louise Söderlund Giertz is a Swedish inventor, designer, and internet personality based in the United States. Born on November 1, 1990, in the Stockholm region of Sweden, she was raised in a middle-class family as the youngest of three children. Her mother worked as a television presenter, while her father was a television producer. Giertz initially pursued physics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology before leaving after a year. She later studied advertising at Hyper Island in Stockholm, where she developed an interest in hardware hacking. During an internship in San Francisco with Punch Through Design, she gained practical experience working with microcontrollers, ultimately teaching herself robotics using open-source platforms.

Giertz created her primary YouTube channel in March 2013 and posted her first robot-focused video in August 2015. Featuring an automated toothbrush helmet, the clip went viral online. Over the following months, she published additional short videos showcasing comedic, deliberately flawed machinery designed to perform routine daily activities. Her early creations included a robotic arm for serving breakfast, a slapping alarm clock, a lipstick application device, and a hair-chopping drone. These projects gained widespread popular traction across online communities, earning her the moniker "Queen of Shitty Robots." By early 2016, content creation had become her full-time occupation.

Her early success led to high-profile media opportunities and collaborations. After a brief clip of her lipstick robot went viral in early 2016, TV host Adam Savage invited Giertz to move to California and join his online platform, Tested.com. She subsequently featured her inventions on late-night talk shows, co-hosted the Swedish technology television program Manick, and presented at a 2018 TED conference. Additionally, she produced higher-budget content series, including a 2017 space-themed project sponsored by Google that included an isolation simulation in her bathroom and a flight aboard a zero-gravity aircraft.

In April 2018, Giertz was diagnosed with a noncancerous brain tumor, a meningioma behind her right eye that she humorously nicknamed Brian. She documented her medical condition and recovery process online, sharing upbeat and comedic updates through two rounds of medical treatment. During her recovery, she began shifting her creative focus away from humorous, non-functional robotics toward practical product design. In late 2018, she successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund her first commercial product, a habit-tracking device called the Every Day Calendar.

Giertz achieved additional prominence in June 2019 when she collaborated on Truckla, a project detailing the custom conversion of a Tesla sedan into a pickup truck, which led to an invitation to Tesla's official vehicle unveiling. Following her pivot toward functional design, she officially opened an online store named Yetch in 2022 to market her original creations. Her commercial releases have included a folding clothing hanger and a jigsaw puzzle intentionally manufactured with a missing piece, alongside videos highlighting home and pet-related build projects.