Simone Giertz

If ever someone defied pigeonholing, it’s Simone Giertz. The Swedish YouTube star has done all kinds of things in her time, from sports journalism to acting in Chinese sitcoms to editing the official Swedish national website. She then became known as the self-titled “Queen of Sh*tty Robots” after using her engineering background to make deliberately and comically useless inventions, such as an alarm clock that slaps you awake. She abdicated that throne in 2018, feeling that the joke had run its course, and since then, she has been focusing on her popular Yetch Store, whose eccentric but high-selling products include sawdust socks, a screwdriver ring, and a white jigsaw that has one piece missing.

Giertz, who currently lives in Los Angeles, was born in Stockholm in 1990. Her mother is a famous Swedish television presenter, and she is a descendant of the founder of the Ericsson telecommunications company. She studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and later at digital creative business school Hyper Island in Karlskrona. It was at the latter that she began to create deliberately useless inventions (older readers may see a similarity with cult British sitcom Reggie Perrin and his ‘GROT’ company). She took her work onto YouTube in 2013 after making a toothbrush helmet for a kid’s show pilot that never aired. Today, she has 2.65 million subscribers and her videos have been viewed over 164 million times. She also has over 475,000 Instagram followers. She has also given a TED talk on the value of “useless” inventions for creativity and progress.

In 2018, Giertz revealed she had been diagnosed with a non-cancerous brain tumour. Despite an operation to remove it, the tumour returned in 2019 and she underwent further treatment, returning to work later that year.