Take A Peek Inside The Marvelously Mechanical Mind Of This Oddball Inventor
A DECADE AGO, Swedish-born and L.A.-based inventor Simone Giertz, 32, started a YouTube channel to share her inventions. Her audience started small, but interest in Giertz’s quirky-yet-ingenious solutions to everyday problems—like a helmet that brushes her teeth and an alarm clock that slaps her awake with a rubber hand—steadily gained momentum, resulting in a following today of over 2.6 million subscribers. “Building shitty robots has served me well,” she says. “It helps me get out of my head and approach topics with levity.”
Her creative outlook led to an invitation to give a Ted Talk in 2018—now viewed over 4 million times—on the topic, “Why You Should Make Useless Things.” She addressed the audience wearing a googly-eyed chainmail shirt that she spent 14 hours making so she would be able to “look at the audience as much as they were looking at her,” and her popularity skyrocketed, resulting not only in more YouTube followers, but also opportunities to give talks and workshops, create a signature merch line, Yetch, and develop a TV series based on her work. When asked about the show, which is still in development, she says she’d “rather keep it on the down low.” But she does share that she has, “turned down other shows in the past [because] I don’t have interest in doing a kid’s show.” “It feels like that’s always offered to women [in STEM fields],” she continues. “Women are always tasked with education and inspiration. But I think we need to speak more about women’s work.”
Although she’s been crowned “The Queen of Shitty Robots” by fans, Giertz is now ready to give herself more credit. “It became a shtick,” she says of the whole “Shitty Robots” thing. “I was like, ‘Why am I acting like I don’t know what I’m doing?’ As I got older, my skills grew. So, I’m now letting the content I make evolve with me as a person.”To find out more about Giertz and shop her Yetch store, visit simonegiertz.com.
Top Image: Photo Credit: Simone Giertz
