A Merseyside Mum of 2, who last year fought breast cancer, and won, after opting for alternative therapies over Chemo, is harnessing her renewed desire to create a bigger legacy with her work, as she sets out to accelerate the growth of her UK franchise expansion of her wellbeing organisation, The Happiness Club, with a target of 60 UK franchisees over the next 18 months.
Jo Robinson-Howarth, 54, is expanding her franchise network from its current 11 partners, to a target of 60 sites across the UK before moving on to International expansion in a growth trajectory that reflects both a growing demand for accessible mental and emotional health support in schools and workplaces and the strength of a business model built around genuine impact.
Jo, a qualified hypnotherapist and mindfulness practitioner, was diagnosed with early-stage HER2+ breast cancer in July 2025. She has now studied, and worked in the fields of neuroscience, hypnotherapy and mindfulness for over a decade. With her cancer diagnosis she approached it the way she approaches everything these days: with curiosity, research, and an unshakeable belief in the connection between mind, body and emotional truth. Declining chemotherapy in favour of an intensive programme of alternative therapies, Jo changed her nutrition, and went into surgery under local anaesthetic, having rejected the need for a general anaesthetic. Emerging with a small dent in her left breast that she describes as ‘honouring the process’ she’s taken her learnings from this experience too, as a gift to further support her work.
The Happiness Club already has franchisees operating across regions from Sussex to Scotland, Shropshire to South East of England and many regions in between, run by local mums who quit the corporate rat race and wanted an alternative career; other practitioners who have added Jo’s strings to their bow; midlife women who faced redundancy and decided to step into entrepreneurship, and members of the Happiness Club who used the tools in their own lives and wanted to spread the impact. There’s also a huge range of other circumstances too.
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 expansion comes at a moment of acute national need as it’s been announced that the UK reached three million working days lost to mental ill-health by 19th February 2026, just 50 days into the year, according to data from the Health and Safety Executive. Mental ill-health is now the leading cause of long-term absence (41%) and a key driver of short-term absence (29%) across UK workplaces, according to the CIPD. Meanwhile, new NHS data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey reveals 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 the Mental Health Foundation describes as demanding 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.”
— Jo Robinson-Howarth, Founder, The Happiness Club
Each franchisee is trained to deliver two core programmes. The first is The Schools Programme: A four-week, CPD-accredited curriculum teaching 12 mindfulness techniques to entire primary schools, giving children the emotional tools that build lifelong resilience. “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 Business Workshops, due to the rising stats in poor mental wellbeing costs UK employers, which were recently estimated to be £42 to £45 billion annually through presenteeism, sickness absence and staff turnover, according to the Mental Health Foundation. Mindfulness and resilience training is delivered directly to corporate clients, addressing the well-documented epidemic of workplace stress and burnout with practical, evidence-informed tools.
Jo’s path to founding The Happiness Club was anything but straightforward. Growing up navigating family breakdown, emotional abuse and a deep-rooted belief that she wasn’t good enough, Jo spent decades experiencing first-hand the anxiety she now helps others overcome. It was the sudden death of her father at 25 that led her to therapy for the first time, an experience she describes as life-changing. After years of personal development work, she retrained as an advanced hypnotherapist, then as a mindfulness practitioner, and began seeing one-to-one clients. The pattern she noticed was consistent: people wanted support not just for one hour a week, but every single day.
In 2015, The Happiness Club was born, an online membership delivering daily bitesize content, tools and community support, built on the belief that mental and emotional wellbeing should be accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford private therapy.
At the heart of The Happiness Club’s expansion is a challenge to the way the wellness industry has traditionally operated. Jo is a vocal critic of what she calls ‘high vibes culture’, the performative positivity that teaches people to suppress difficult emotions rather than process them.
“Real happiness is the ability to be fully present to all of life, the difficult and the joyful, the messy and the beautiful,” says Jo. “The willingness to feel everything, rather than chase only the approved emotions. That’s what we teach, and it’s why it works.”
Jo’s long-term ambition is for The Happiness Club to grow to a minimum of 60 UK franchisees before beginning international expansion, with corporate sponsorship sought to fund memberships for people who cannot independently afford them. The schools programme, she believes, is the most powerful tool of all.
“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,” she says. “This is prevention, not just treatment.”
For more info on how to become a franchisee visit The Happiness Club website.
