A Merseyside mother of two who successfully fought breast cancer last year by choosing alternative therapies over conventional chemotherapy is directing the sense of purpose that experience has given her into a significant expansion of her wellbeing business, The Happiness Club, with a target of 60 UK franchise partners to be secured within 18 months.
Jo Robinson-Howarth, aged 54, is working to grow her current network of 11 franchisees to a total of 60 locations throughout the UK, after which she intends to pursue international expansion. The trajectory reflects both the increasing national demand for accessible support around mental and emotional health in schools and workplaces, and the resilience of a business model that has been built around creating real and lasting impact.
Jo, who holds qualifications in hypnotherapy and mindfulness practice, was diagnosed with early-stage HER2+ breast cancer in July 2025, following more than a decade of study and professional work across neuroscience, hypnotherapy and mindfulness. She took the decision to decline chemotherapy and instead pursued an intensive programme of alternative treatments, overhauling her diet and undergoing surgery under local anaesthetic after choosing not to have a general anaesthetic.
Across the UK, The Happiness Club’s franchisees are already active in a diverse range of regions, stretching from Sussex to Scotland and from Shropshire to the South East of England and beyond. The network is largely made up of local women who chose to walk away from corporate life in favour of a career with greater personal meaning. This includes practitioners who have added The Happiness Club’s tools to their existing professional practice, women who faced redundancy in midlife and chose entrepreneurship as their response, and individuals who first encountered the organisation as members, found that it changed their own lives, and wanted to share that experience more widely.
Practitioners deliver The Happiness Club’s mindfulness-based resilience programmes to businesses and its CPD-accredited emotional management curriculum to primary and secondary schools.
The scale of the need that this expansion is designed to meet is striking. According to data from the Health and Safety Executive, the UK had already accumulated three million working days lost to mental ill-health by 19th February 2026, barely seven weeks into the year. The CIPD reports that mental ill-health is now the single most common cause of long-term absence from work, responsible for 41% of all such cases, and a significant contributor to short-term absence at 29%. The Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, published by the NHS, reveals that 22.6% of adults between the ages of 16 and 64 are currently living with a common mental health condition such as anxiety or depression, compared with 17.6% in 2007, an increase that the Mental Health Foundation has said demands urgent attention.
“Stress and anxiety aren’t character flaws, they are learned programmes. And if they can be learned, they can be unlearned. That’s the foundation of everything we do, and the reason our franchise model works: because it’s built on tools that genuinely change people’s lives,” said Jo.
New franchisees are prepared to deliver two distinct programmes. The first, The Schools Programme, is a four-week CPD-accredited course that introduces 12 mindfulness techniques to whole primary school communities, giving children a set of emotional tools designed to support resilience throughout their lives. “With one in four young people now experiencing a common mental health condition, a 47% increase since 2007, early intervention has never been more critical,” Jo said.
The second strand is Business Workshops, which exist to address the measurable and growing cost of poor mental wellbeing in the workplace. The Mental Health Foundation estimates that this costs UK employers between £42 and £45 billion each year through the combined effects of presenteeism, sickness absence and staff turnover. The workshops bring practical, evidence-informed mindfulness and resilience training directly to organisations, addressing a crisis of stress and burnout that is now firmly established across UK workplaces.
Central to The Happiness Club’s approach and to the philosophy behind its expansion is a willingness to challenge the way the wellness industry has long presented itself. Jo speaks critically about what she calls high vibes culture, a tendency within wellness to promote a form of performative positivity that leads people to push down difficult emotions rather than acknowledging and processing them.
“Real happiness is the ability to be fully present to all of life, the difficult and the joyful, the messy and the beautiful,” added Jo. “The willingness to feel everything, rather than chase only the approved emotions. That’s what we teach, and it’s why it works.
“If the daily habits of mental and emotional self-care can be taught early, the downstream impact on stress, anxiety and resilience across a lifetime is profound. This is prevention, not just treatment.”
Further details on becoming a franchisee are available at thehappinessclub.co.uk/franchise.
