A mother of two from Merseyside who overcame breast cancer last year after choosing alternative therapies in place of chemotherapy is channelling her renewed sense of purpose into an ambitious plan to grow her wellbeing organisation, The Happiness Club, to 60 UK franchisees within the next 18 months.
Jo Robinson-Howarth, 54, is building on her existing network of 11 franchise partners with the goal of reaching 60 sites across the UK before turning her attention to international expansion, a growth plan that speaks both to the rising demand for accessible mental and emotional health support in schools and workplaces and to the proven strength of a business model founded on genuine, measurable impact.
A qualified hypnotherapist and mindfulness practitioner, Jo received a diagnosis of early-stage HER2+ breast cancer in July 2025. She has spent more than a decade studying and working across the disciplines of neuroscience, hypnotherapy and mindfulness. Choosing to decline chemotherapy, she instead committed to an intensive course of alternative therapies, making significant changes to her nutrition and ultimately undergoing surgery under local anaesthetic, having made the decision to forgo a general anaesthetic entirely.
The Happiness Club already has franchisees working across a wide spread of the country, from Sussex to Scotland and Shropshire to the South East of England, with many other regions represented in between. The network is run by local women who chose to leave behind corporate careers in search of something more meaningful. Among them are practitioners who have incorporated Jo’s methodologies into their existing work, women in midlife who faced redundancy and took the opportunity to step into entrepreneurship, and former members of The Happiness Club who experienced the benefit of its tools in their own lives and decided they wanted to extend that impact to others.
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 timing of this expansion is significant. The UK reached three million working days lost to mental ill-health by 19th February 2026, just 50 days into the year, according to figures published by the Health and Safety Executive. Data from the CIPD identifies mental ill-health as the leading cause of long-term workplace absence, accounting for 41% of cases, as well as a key driver of short-term absence at 29%. Separately, new NHS data drawn from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey shows that 22.6% of adults aged 16 to 64 are now living with a common mental health condition such as anxiety or depression, up from 17.6% in 2007, a rise that the Mental Health Foundation has described as requiring urgent action.
“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.
Each person who joins the franchise is trained to deliver two core programmes. The first is The Schools Programme, a four-week CPD-accredited curriculum that teaches 12 mindfulness techniques to entire primary schools, equipping children with the emotional skills they need to build resilience that will serve them 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 is a suite of Business Workshops, developed in response to the growing evidence of poor mental wellbeing in the workplace, which costs UK employers an estimated £42 to £45 billion annually through presenteeism, sickness absence and staff turnover, according to the Mental Health Foundation. These workshops bring mindfulness and resilience training directly to corporate clients, offering practical, evidence-informed responses to the widely documented crisis of workplace stress and burnout.
Running through everything The Happiness Club does is a deliberate challenge to the norms of the wellness industry as it has traditionally operated. Jo is an outspoken critic of what she refers to as high vibes culture, the kind of performative positivity that encourages people to suppress difficult emotions rather than work through 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.”
Those interested in joining the franchise network can find further information at thehappinessclub.co.uk/franchise.
