Simone Giertz
Simone Luna Louise Söderlund Giertz is an American-based Swedish inventor and YouTuber who creates robot and maker videos. Her early videos in the 2010s involved robots that intentionally failed at everyday tasks, leading to the nickname "Queen of Shitty Robots". Later videos involved more useful projects, maintaining a comedic, rather than educational, tone. She has also designed products to sell, creating an online shop, the Yetch Store, in 2022.
Originally from the Stockholm area, Giertz was self-taught in robotics, gaining experience with hardware while studying at an advertising school. She created her YouTube channel in 2013 and posted her first robot video, featuring a tooth-brushing helmet, in August 2015. She continued to post short videos showing her creations, including "The Breakfast Machine" and "The Wake-up Machine" in November 2015, both of which received one million views. After a February 2016 video featuring a lipstick robot, Giertz gained the attention of presenter Adam Savage and began working on his series, Tested.com, in California. Giertz presented her robots during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and a TED talk. Giertz attempted to train herself to be an astronaut in a 2017 video series, which included two of her most viewed videos. She worked on larger projects around 2018, including a branded video to promote the television drama Westworld.
Giertz was diagnosed with a noncancerous brain tumor in April 2018. She posted humorous content about her health during two rounds of treatments over the following year. As she shifted away from her "shitty robots", Giertz began designing products. Her first release was the Every Day Calendar, a habit-tracking product that she had developed during her recovery and funded using Kickstarter in 2018. Giertz gained wider fame for Truckla, a project documented in June 2019, in which she and collaborators modified a Tesla car into a pickup truck; she was then invited to the launch of the official Tesla pickup truck. In the 2020s, several of Giertz's videos involved projects for her home and dog. Since 2022, she has sold her designs through the Yetch Store, including a jigsaw puzzle with an intentionally missing piece and a folding clothes hanger.
Early life
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. Giertz is a descendant of Lars Magnus Ericsson, founder of Ericsson.In elementary school, Giertz was interested in woodworking. She has named the Disney cartoon character Gyro Gearloose as one of her earliest inspirations. Giertz felt obsessed with her grades in school and developed a fear of failure.
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 studied physics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a research university in Stockholm, but dropped out after a year. In 2012, she became an editor for Sweden's official website, working on the Chinese-language version.
In 2013, Giertz began studying advertising at a trade school, Hyper Island in Stockholm. Giertz's interest in electronics began that year, when she attended a woman's talk about hacking hardware. 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. After she quit her internship, her US visa lapsed, and she returned to Sweden to live with her mother. She also held brief jobs in technology journalism. Giertz was self-taught in robotics, making use of open-source hardware such as Arduino.
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. 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. This video was seven seconds long and showed the helmet moving across her face without using toothpaste, unable to reach the back teeth. This video went viral. She began posting more robots inspired by everyday tasks. She posted twelve more videos in 2015, including one in which she electrically shocked her face while she read comments on her videos.A video titled "The Breakfast Machine", posted in November 2015, was Giertz's first to feature a robotic arm. In the video, it poorly pours milk and cereal, then holds up an empty spoon. On November 11, she posted "The Wake-up Machine", 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, including one that showed it tangling Giertz's hair. She would later say that this creation was "the first one that really took off". "The Breakfast Machine" and "The Wake-up Machine" each received one million views. 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, a robot that used tongs and rubber hands to generate applause, one that shampooed the user's hair, 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. Her subscriber count reached 200,000 later that year.
Giertz's videos became popular on a subreddit called "Shitty Robots", with one post becoming the subreddit's most popular of all time. The subreddit's users gave her the nickname "Queen of Shitty Robots", which she began using herself. Most of Giertz's early videos received hundreds of thousands of views, 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. Gifs from her videos went viral on various websites.
File:Adam Savage 2017.png|thumb|alt=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 chin 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. Giertz then joined Savage's project Tested.com, collaborating on her first project with Savage, a helmet that fed its wearer popcorn, often missing the mouth. Giertz has called this her favorite of her robots. She created further videos exclusive to paid subscribers of the website. Savage became a mentor to Giertz. In a video posted a few months later, Giertz said she had "had the worst impostor syndrome" about working with Savage.
Television appearances and other work
Giertz showcased three of her robots on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in late 2016, in which she demonstrated the lipstick robot on Colbert. She made other talk show appearances, including on the Spanish show El Hormiguero, and her video "The Wake-up Machine" was featured on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Giertz hosted a 2016 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.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, and later published a profanity-filled video titled "Why My Sponsors are Leaving". 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. It released these edits under the title Scrappy Robots with Simone Giertz.
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. In 2017, she co-hosted the comedy TV show Manick with on Swedish TV6. The premise of the show is that the hosts invent funny, creative solutions to everyday problems. After getting an American driving license in 2017, Giertz drove a Comuta-Car—a yellow electric car from the 1970s—which she called Cheese Louise as it resembled a cheese wedge. 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.