Simone Giertz

Simone Giertz became famous for building robots that are gloriously, deliberately terrible at their jobs -- a helmet that feeds you breakfast (badly), an alarm clock that slaps you awake, a lipstick-applying machine that misses your mouth entirely. But calling her the Queen of Shitty Robots, while accurate and her own chosen title, undersells the quiet revolution she started. By celebrating imperfection and finding joy in the creative process rather than the outcome, Giertz gave permission to an entire generation of makers to just start building, even if what they built was hilariously broken.

Her journey took a dramatic turn when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, an experience she shared with her audience with characteristic honesty and dark humor. She named the tumor Brian, documented her surgery and recovery, and returned to building with renewed purpose. The experience seemed to shift her creative ambitions. While she still makes things that are playful and funny, she began channeling her skills into products that actually work -- and that people actually want to buy.

The Truckla project exemplified this evolution. Frustrated that Tesla had not yet released a pickup truck, Giertz commissioned the conversion of a Tesla Model 3 into a working pickup. The project was absurd, expensive, and deeply impractical, but it was also real engineering -- and the resulting vehicle actually drove. The video documenting the build went massively viral and became a defining moment in modern maker culture: proof that individual creators could tackle projects at a scale previously reserved for corporations.

Today, through her company Yetch, Giertz designs and ships real consumer products like the Every Day Calendar, a physical habit tracker with satisfying toggle switches. She has evolved from internet comedian to legitimate product designer without losing the irreverent spirit that made her famous. Her legacy is not the robots themselves but the mindset she popularized: that the point of making things is not to be perfect, but to be making things at all.