Simone Giertz: Turned Bad Robots Into a Real Design Career

From funny homemade machines to Yetch Studio, Truckla and million-dollar product launches

News TrapSeptember 19, 2026

0 12 8 minutes read

Introduction

Simone Giertz is a Swedish inventor, product designer and YouTube creator known for building machines that often did ordinary jobs in hilariously bad ways.

That was the start. Not the whole story.

Today, her work looks quite different. As of September 2026, Simone Giertz is the founder and CEO of Yetch Studio, where she develops furniture, lighting, tools and other physical products.

She still makes videos. She still experiments. But now many of those ideas become real products people can buy.

Her career includes viral robots, a Tesla pickup conversion called Truckla, a popular TED Talk, several successful Kickstarter campaigns and an honorary doctorate in Informatics.

Quick Facts About Simone Giertz

Fact	Verified Detail
Full name	Simone Giertz
Profession	Inventor, product designer and YouTube creator
Nationality	Swedish
Birthplace	Stockholm, Sweden
Raised in	Saltsjö-Duvnäs, Sweden
Current role	Founder and CEO of Yetch Studio
Company	Yetch Studio
Company established	2022
Known for	Comedic robots, engineering videos and product design
Major vehicle project	Truckla
Major talk	“Why you should make useless things”
Education	Studied at KTH and later attended Hyper Island
Major honour	Honorary Doctor of Informatics, University of Skövde
YouTube audience	Around 2.86 million subscribers in September 2026

Who Is Simone Giertz?

Simone Giertz first became famous online for machines that were supposed to help with basic everyday tasks.

They rarely helped.

One robot tried to feed her breakfast. Another applied lipstick. There was a toothbrush helmet and other machines that looked clever but behaved badly.

That was basically the joke.

She intentionally built imperfect robots because the process gave her room to test ideas without worrying too much about making everything perfect.

People noticed.

Her videos spread widely, and Giertz became associated with the nickname “Queen of Shitty Robots.”

But her work did not stay there.

Over time, she started building projects that actually needed to work. That change helped move her career toward serious product design.

Early Life and Education

Simone Giertz was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and grew up in Saltsjö-Duvnäs, outside the city.

Her education took her through several different places.

She attended high school in Sweden and Kenya and also spent time in China as an exchange student.

Later, she studied physics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. She left the programme after about one year.

That decision changed her path.

Giertz later attended Hyper Island, where she studied in its Digital Data Strategist programme.

During that period, she worked as an intern at Punch Through Design in San Francisco.

That gave her direct experience with hardware, electronics and prototyping.

In 2014, before her YouTube career took off, she published an open-source Bluetooth door-lock project through Make:.

So the maker work came early.

How Her YouTube Career Started

Giertz began regularly posting her creations on YouTube in 2015.

Her style was unusual.

Most engineering creators tried to build something polished. Giertz often did the opposite.

She made machines that failed in funny ways.

The approach worked because viewers could see the full process. Mistakes stayed in. Failed tests stayed in. Nothing felt too serious.

That made engineering feel more approachable.

Her robotic toothbrush helmet became one of the projects linked with her early rise. Other creations tried to handle breakfast, lipstick, hair cutting and waking up.

Soon, her audience grew far beyond the maker community.

She also worked with well-known maker Adam Savage on a popcorn-feeding helmet and appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2016.

Her TED Talk

In 2018, Simone Giertz spoke at TED in Vancouver.

Her talk was titled “Why you should make useless things.”

The idea was simple.

Making something silly can help remove the fear of failure.

Instead of asking whether every project will become useful or impressive, people can just build, test and learn.

The talk became one of her best-known public appearances and has received millions of plays through TED.

A Major Career Change in 2018

In April 2018, Giertz publicly told her audience that she had been diagnosed with a brain tumour.

She later underwent surgery and openly documented parts of that period on her YouTube channel.

Reliable reporting later identified the tumour as a noncancerous meningioma.

The experience affected how she thought about her work.

She began putting more time into projects she genuinely wanted to make rather than feeling locked into the intentionally bad-robot format that had made her famous.

That shift soon became visible.

The Every Day Calendar

One of her first major commercial products was the Every Day Calendar.

She launched it on Kickstarter in 2018.

The product was built around a simple habit-tracking idea. Users could press a button for each day they completed a chosen task, creating a visible chain across the calendar.

The crowdfunding response was strong.

The campaign raised $593,352 from 2,305 backers against a $35,000 goal.

This was an early sign that Giertz could turn an online prototype into a physical product people were willing to buy.

Truckla Became One of Her Biggest Projects

Then came Truckla.

In 2019, Giertz took a Tesla Model 3 and turned it into a custom electric pickup-style vehicle.

She called it Truckla.

This was no deliberately useless robot.

The project involved cutting and rebuilding major parts of an expensive car so it could work more like a small pickup.

Truckla became one of her most recognised builds.

It also clearly showed how much her work had changed.

The joke was still there.

But the engineering had become much more serious.

Simone Giertz Founded Yetch Studio

In 2022, Giertz established Yetch Studio.

The name comes from the English pronunciation of her surname, Giertz.

Yetch gave her a way to turn workshop ideas into commercial products.

As of September 2026, she serves as the company’s founder and CEO.

Her process still starts with hands-on experimentation.

She builds prototypes, tests what works, changes weak parts and then works with engineers and manufacturers to prepare selected products for production.

The business now sells furniture, lighting, accessories and other objects based on her designs.

Coat Hinger

One of Yetch’s better-known products is the Coat Hinger.

It is a folding clothes hanger made for wardrobes where normal hangers take up too much depth.

Giertz launched it on Kickstarter in November 2023.

The campaign raised $569,523 from 4,099 backers.

The production version is made from stainless steel and folds to let clothing sit in a shallower space.

It solves a small problem.

That is pretty much the point.

Spool Table

Another Yetch project is the Spool Table.

Its shape looks like a giant spool of thread.

The idea had been around for years. Giertz built an early version in 2016 before returning to the concept later.

Yetch released the production model in the United States in 2025.

The object works as a side table, lamp and storage piece.

It also shows how Giertz now treats older workshop experiments as possible commercial products rather than one-off video ideas.

The Laundry Chair

The Laundry Chair became one of Giertz’s biggest commercial launches.

Think about the chair in a bedroom where clothes pile up because they are not clean enough for the wardrobe but not dirty enough for the laundry basket.

Giertz built a chair specifically for that habit.

The design includes a rotating clothes rail that gives those clothes somewhere intentional to go.

Its Kickstarter campaign ran from March to April 2026.

The original goal was $50,000.

Backers pledged $1,264,868.

That came from 1,281 supporters.

By September 2026, Yetch listed the Laundry Chair as a $1,100 pre-order, with the design finished and production work continuing.

The Scissor Lamp

Giertz was still releasing new designs in September 2026.

One of the latest was the Scissor Lamp.

Its design takes visual cues from a pair of scissors.

She published a YouTube video about the project on 11 September 2026, showing that her content and product businesses continue to work closely together.

A strange workshop idea can become a video.

Then maybe a product.

That pattern now sits at the centre of her work.

Honorary Doctorate

Giertz received a major academic honour in 2025.

The University of Skövde in Sweden named her an Honorary Doctor of Informatics.

She received the honour during the university’s academic ceremony on 21 March 2025.

The university pointed to her work making technology easier for broad audiences to understand and her way of showing that mistakes can be part of learning.

It is a notable achievement for someone who left her earlier university physics programme.

Simone Giertz and UNHCR

Her work has also moved outside normal YouTube and product projects.

Giertz took part in We Were Here, a documentary series produced with UNHCR and YouTube.

She travelled to Jordan and worked with Syrian refugee and toymaker Mohammad on a remote-controlled helicopter.

The wider We Were Here project later won a Webby People’s Voice Award in the documentary category in 2024.

Is Simone Giertz Still a YouTuber?

Yes.

She has moved heavily into product design, but she has not stopped making YouTube videos.

As of September 2026, her verified channel had roughly 2.86 million subscribers.

Recent uploads still follow her familiar style: building something strange, testing it, showing what goes wrong and figuring out how to fix it.

The subject matter has changed, though.

There are fewer deliberately useless robots.

There is more furniture, engineering and product development.

Simone Giertz Net Worth and Income

Reliable public records do not provide enough evidence to state Simone Giertz’s personal net worth.

So a precise number should not be presented as fact.

What can be checked are her public crowdfunding results.

Her three major Kickstarter campaigns mentioned above raised:

Every Day Calendar: $593,352
Coat Hinger: $569,523
Laundry Chair: $1,264,868

Together, those campaigns received more than $2.42 million in pledges.

That money should not be confused with personal income.

Manufacturing, shipping, staffing, taxes and other business costs come out of product campaigns, so Kickstarter totals cannot be used to calculate someone’s wealth.