Meet Frances
Frances Williams is the founder of The Calmness Crew, a children’s wellbeing brand built around practical calming techniques, characters and play. Alongside developing the business, she works part time as Head of People at Playtonic Games and is a wife and mother.
When Helping One Child Became Something Bigger
Frances Williams did not set out to build a children’s wellbeing company. The idea for The Calmness Crew began much closer to home, during a difficult period when she was trying to help her daughter through anxiety and panic attacks.
What followed was not a carefully planned career pivot, but a deeply personal search for something that might make difficult moments a little easier. Frances began researching calming techniques, discovering tools such as box breathing, grounding and positive affirmations. She practised them with her daughter and saw how useful they could be. But she also noticed something important: knowing a technique is one thing; remembering it when you are frightened or overwhelmed is another.
That observation became the beginning of The Calmness Crew.
“I never originally set out to build a toy or children’s wellbeing brand. It grew from being a mum trying to help her own child.”
The simplicity of that origin matters. Frances was not looking for a business idea. She was looking for a way to help someone she loved.
A Career Built From Many Different Chapters
Long before The Calmness Crew, Frances had already learned that careers rarely unfold in a straight line.
Her professional journey began remarkably early, at just 14, when she started working at Burton Albion Football Club. Over the years, she moved through a wide range of industries and roles, working with organisations including Cadbury, Matalan, Health Fabric, Medilink and Healthcare at Home.
At one stage, her work even involved making chemotherapy injections, a role that carried a level of responsibility far removed from the children’s products she would eventually create.
Gradually, though, Frances found herself drawn toward people, culture and helping others. That led her into HR and People leadership, where empathy, listening and support became central to how she worked.
In many ways, her two professional lives are less separate than they might first appear. Whether she is supporting employees as a People leader or helping children navigate difficult emotions through The Calmness Crew, her focus remains people.
“I’ve always believed that people should feel listened to, valued and supported.”
It is a principle that seems to have followed Frances through every chapter of her career, even when the setting itself changed.
From a Kitchen Table Idea to Something Real
There is a particular moment in the life of any founder when an idea stops existing only in their imagination.
For Frances, it was seeing the first Calmness Crew plushie come out of a factory.
Until then, the characters and products had lived largely in her head. Seeing the first physical product made the possibility tangible. Something that had started with helping her daughter could now potentially help other children.
But bringing that idea into the world required more than creativity. Frances had to learn an entirely new industry from the ground up.
She taught herself about trademarks after initially making mistakes with her own application. She learned about manufacturing, minimum order quantities, packaging, shipping, customs, toy safety regulations, CE and UKCA compliance, batteries, barcodes, Amazon requirements and wholesale pricing.
Some lessons came at a cost. On one early stock order, an incorrect customs invoice resulted in almost double the charges she should have paid.
There were moments when she simply did not know what to do next.
Her response was rarely to retreat. She researched, asked questions, found people who could help and tried again.
“I’ve learnt not to see getting something wrong as failure. I ask, learn, fix it and keep moving forward.”
That mindset became particularly important when the financial stakes grew. Frances and her family eventually remortgaged their home so she could place a substantial stock order.
It was a serious leap of faith. The business had not yet become what it might one day be, but Frances believed strongly enough in the purpose behind it to take the risk.
The Moment the Idea Found Its Place on a Shelf
Some of the most meaningful milestones in Frances’s journey have arrived unexpectedly.
Winning Theo Paphitis’ Small Business Sunday gave The Calmness Crew recognition and, more importantly, opened a door. Through the opportunity, Frances was able to pitch to Ryman and Robert Dyas, eventually securing her first retail order from Ryman.
Then came the moment she walked into a Ryman store and saw her products sitting on the shelves.
For someone who had started around her kitchen table, it was difficult not to feel the weight of that moment.
Meeting Theo at the Wimbledon Ryman store, with The Calmness Crew products on the shelves behind her, made the experience feel almost circular: an idea that began in a deeply personal family experience had travelled into a national retail environment.
Since then, there have been other milestones, more than 1,000 products sold, an Amazon launch, recognition through the Greater Birmingham Chambers Women’s Entrepreneur Pitch, finalist places in the UK StartUp Awards and Enterprise Vision Awards, and an opportunity to showcase the brand through Simon Squibb’s Dreamland at Ideas Fest.
Now, Frances is preparing to take The Calmness Crew to Los Angeles and introduce it to international toy buyers.
Yet the numbers and recognition are not what she holds closest.
The messages from parents are.
When a parent tells her that their child used a calming technique during an anxious moment, took their plushie somewhere they were nervous about going, or found comfort in something she created, the original reason for the business comes back into focus.
The work is no longer only about what Frances and her family experienced.
It has become about what another family might experience next.
Teaching Children Tools They Can Carry With Them
The Calmness Crew is built around a straightforward idea: children can learn practical ways to manage difficult emotions, and those lessons can be introduced through things they already understand — characters, stories, toys and play.
Its products include talking plushies, Calm Cubes, books and animations, with individual characters connected to techniques such as box breathing, grounding, positive affirmations, body scanning, gratitude and muscle relaxation.
The intention is not simply to give a child something comforting to hold. Frances wants the techniques themselves to become familiar enough that children can draw on them when they need them.
A child might be anxious about starting school, visiting a doctor or dentist, having a scan, travelling, going to bed or simply facing something unfamiliar. In those moments, remembering a technique can be difficult. Practising it beforehand, alongside a character they know and trust, can make it feel more natural.
There is also a wider purpose behind the work: making conversations about emotions feel ordinary.
Frances wants children to understand that feeling worried, frightened or overwhelmed is not something to be embarrassed about. Emotional wellbeing, in her view, deserves the same everyday attention we give to physical wellbeing.
And the support extends to parents, too.
She understands personally how helpless it can feel when your child is struggling. Giving families something practical they can do together can replace the feeling of having no answer with a small but meaningful sense of agency.
“That same belief is at the heart of The Calmness Crew.”
Keeping Ambition and Kindness in the Same Room
For Frances, ambition has never meant leaving kindness behind.
The values she returns to are simple: kindness, integrity, empathy and fairness. They shape how she approaches her work in HR and how she builds her own company.
She believes you can be driven without becoming detached from people. You can make mistakes without allowing them to define you. You can want to achieve something significant while still paying attention to how you treat the people around you.
That perspective has been shaped in part by her mother, the person Frances describes as her biggest role model.
Her mother lost both of her parents by the age of 18, raised five children as a stay-at-home mum and, at 40, retrained to become an Occupational Therapist. Frances remembers not only her resilience, but the fact that she never lost her kindness in the process.
There is something of that example in Frances’s own story: the belief that a difficult chapter does not have to close the story, and that starting again is possible at any stage of life.
A Bigger World for The Calmness Crew
Frances’s ambitions for The Calmness Crew extend well beyond the products that exist today.
She hopes to develop the characters into a much larger world through animation, books and toys, with each character helping children understand a different emotional wellbeing technique.
One of the projects closest to that vision is an animation series. Frances imagines the characters moving through ordinary childhood situations — starting school, struggling at bedtime, visiting a doctor or dentist, travelling or encountering something frightening — and showing children practical ways to respond.
She also wants the brand to reach homes, schools and healthcare settings around the world.
The international opportunity in Los Angeles represents another step toward that ambition, but the underlying goal remains remarkably consistent: reach more children with tools that may stay with them long after they have outgrown the toys themselves.
Frances hopes that one day a child will recognise a Calmness Crew character and instinctively remember that they have something they can do when life feels overwhelming.
Her dream is not simply to create a successful brand. It is to make emotional wellbeing tools feel as familiar to children as the characters and routines that already form part of their everyday lives.
What Success Looks Like When You Look Beyond the Numbers
For all the business milestones Frances has achieved, she does not define success through money, awards or job titles.
Her definition is much more personal.
She wants to be remembered as someone who was kind, loving and present. Someone who treated people well, learned from her mistakes and tried to leave people and situations a little better than she found them.
And above everything else, she wants her husband and children to know that they were loved.
Professionally, though, she still dreams big. She wants The Calmness Crew to reach millions of children and families around the world. She wants its characters in homes, schools and healthcare environments. She wants children to have emotional tools they can carry with them throughout their lives.
There is no contradiction between those two ambitions.
For Frances, a meaningful professional life and a meaningful family life are part of the same definition of success.
Carrying the Lesson Forward
Perhaps the clearest thread through Frances Williams’s story is that none of her chapters were wasted.
The early jobs, the varied industries, the years in HR, motherhood, the difficult experience with her daughter, the mistakes made while learning the toy industry and the risks taken to build a business have all contributed something to where she is now.
Her advice to others reflects that perspective. A career does not have to be a lifelong commitment to one direction. People can retrain, change course, start again and discover new purposes.
But while circumstances can change, Frances believes values should remain steady.
“Care about what you do, but never forget to care about who you are while you’re doing it.”
That may also be the quiet lesson at the heart of The Calmness Crew itself. Frances took an experience that once left her feeling helpless and began searching for a way to make it useful. She did not know where that search would lead. She simply knew that she wanted to help her daughter.
Years later, that small act of care has become a growing business, a collection of practical tools and a much larger hope: that another child, somewhere, might feel a little less frightened in a difficult moment.
For Frances, that is where ambition becomes meaningful, not in how far an idea travels, but in who it manages to help along the way.
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