Simone Giertz

Simone Giertz is a Swedish inventor and YouTuber best known for her deliberately useless 'shitty robots', for Truckla, the Tesla Model 3 she turned into a pickup truck, and for Yetch, the store where she sells physical products she designs herself, such as the Every Day Calendar. She is based in Los Angeles.

Born in Stockholm on November 1, 1990, Giertz spent parts of her teens abroad, including an exchange year in China and boarding school in Nairobi. She studied physics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology for a year, then advertising at Hyper Island, and taught herself robotics with open hardware such as Arduino. Her YouTube channel took off in 2015 with the toothbrush helmet and a breakfast machine, and in 2016 she joined Adam Savage's Tested and made YouTube her full-time job.

Her comedic robots made her one of the best-known makers online: she appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, gave the 2018 TED talk 'Why you should make useless things', and by May 2025 had about 2.8 million YouTube subscribers. In April 2018 she was diagnosed with a benign brain tumour, which she documented openly through surgery and later radiation treatment.

Giertz then shifted from one-off videos toward real products. Her Every Day Calendar, an LED habit tracker, raised $593,352 on Kickstarter in 2018 against a $35,000 goal. Truckla, built in 2019, drew millions of views. She opened the Yetch store in May 2022, starting with an all-white jigsaw puzzle, and has since sold rings, a folding Coat Hinger hanger (over $60,000 on Kickstarter in 2023) and, in 2026, a Kickstarter for the rotating laundry chair that went viral on Instagram.

She matters to indie makers because she shows a creator building a product business around her own inventions: an audience earned through honest, funny build videos, crowdfunding to validate demand, and a small direct-to-consumer store instead of licensing ideas away. The University of Skövde gave her an honorary doctorate in 2025.