Simone Giertz spent years engineering robots to go wrong in exactly the right way, and now runs a design company where nothing does

Everyone remembers the toothbrush helmet. A motorised arm bolted to a hard hat, flailing a toothbrush somewhere in the vicinity of her mouth, missing, catching her cheek, spraying foam. It is very funny, and the joke conceals the difficulty entirely.

Building a machine that works is a known problem with known methods. Building one that fails in a specific, repeatable, comic way is much harder. It has to run reliably enough to film. It has to fail in the same direction every take. The failure has to be legible in a second and a half so the joke lands. That is precision engineering pointed at an unusual target, and Simone Giertz did it well enough, for long enough, to build an audience of nearly three million people who mostly did not realise they were watching a skilled engineer.

The tumour, and the lamp

In May 2018 she had surgery for a grade I meningioma. In 2019 it came back and she had radiation. She filmed it. Not the sanitised version either: the shaved head, the fear, the mask.

Radiotherapy for a brain tumour requires a mesh mask moulded to your face and bolted to the table so your head cannot move. It is, by universal agreement of people who have worn one, the worst object in medicine. She kept hers, cut a hole in it, put a bulb inside it and made a lamp.

That is not a coping mechanism described in an interview, it is the same instinct as the toothbrush helmet aimed at something much harder. Take the object, understand it, make it into something else. She came back and kept building.

Where it went

Yetch opened in May 2022 and sells things that a good design store would stock without knowing the backstory. A coat hanger that folds so you can get a shirt off without stretching the neck. A fruit bowl that changes size depending on how much fruit you have. A chair specifically for the clothes that are too clean for the wash and too worn for the wardrobe, which then tidies itself away when guests arrive. A music box that plays by popping bubble wrap.

Every one of those is the same joke as the toothbrush helmet, told straight. Notice the small ridiculous fact of daily life that everybody has silently accepted, then take it seriously enough to engineer around it. The comedy phase was the research phase, and the products are funnier for being useful.

Along the way she cut up a Tesla Model 3 and rebuilt it into a working pickup called Truckla, which existed and drove years before anyone sold you one. Next is a set of aluminium dice that hand you random constraints for a creative project, aimed at the store in 2027. Three million people showed up for the robots. What they got was one of the better product designers working.

On refusing to abandon (most) projects.

The Creative Independent, titling an interview with her, which is as good a summary of the method as exists