From a career in nursing to building her own multi-award-winning wellbeing brand, Cass Uk’s story has always been rooted in one instinct…a desire to help people feel better, live more consciously and recognise the importance of looking after themselves before they reach the point of burnout. 

A former NHS registered nurse, author and founder of Tolicious, Cassandra Sonma Ukaobi has built a six-figure business around the belief that taking care of ourselves should feel accessible rather than aspirational; something woven naturally into the rhythm of our lives rather than reserved for the moments when everything else has finally been done. 

For Cass, that philosophy extends far beyond what we eat, drink or apply to our skin. It is about prevention, confidence, boundaries and, perhaps most importantly, encouraging women who are accustomed to caring for everyone around them to recognise that their own needs deserve a place on the list too. 

It is a message that became profoundly personal two years ago when Cass experienced a near-death childbirth experience that fundamentally altered the way she viewed life, motherhood and her own priorities. 

“Life flashed before my eyes,” she recalls. 

Surviving that experience forced her to confront a question many of us spend years avoiding: what exactly are we waiting for? For Cass, the answer was transformational. She decided to take a chance on the business she had been quietly building alongside her career, ultimately leaving her job and committing herself fully to Tolicious. 

The experience would also inspire her book, The Tolicious Way, in which she explores nursing, motherhood, postnatal recovery and survival, alongside the wider question of why so many women find it difficult to choose themselves until circumstances leave them with little alternative. 

For Cass, it reinforced a philosophy that now runs through everything she does: women should not have to wait for illness, exhaustion or a life-changing experience before deciding that their own wellbeing matters. 

From nursing to Tolicious 

Long before Tolicious, however, there was already an entrepreneurial thread running through Cass’s life. 

Growing up in south-eastern Nigeria, she watched her mother combine business with caring for others, supporting women through childbirth while also playing a wider role within the local community. Cass became involved from the age of eight, absorbing lessons in enterprise almost without realising it. 

“I was incorporated into the business from a young age,” she recalls. “So I picked up a lot of my entrepreneurship skills from that.” 

Watching her mother work gave Cass an early understanding that a business could be about more than simply making money; it could solve problems, create independence and have a tangible impact on the lives of other people. 

When she finished high school, however, her own route was less obvious. Her mother, who was working as a nurse in the Caribbean at the time, encouraged her to consider a profession through which she could help others, leading Cass to study nursing in Dominica before eventually moving to London. 

She went on to work as a floor manager in a care home before moving into a private hospital, but the desire to build something of her own never quite disappeared and, through her experiences within healthcare, she began to notice a recurring problem. 

“One of the things I picked up was that we do not have enough preventative measures to get people to take care of themselves before they end up in a hospital bed.” 

That observation would eventually become one of the foundations of Tolicious, drawing together Cass’s medical background with the wellbeing traditions she had grown up around in Nigeria and the Caribbean, where teas, natural ingredients and small rituals of self-care formed an ordinary part of life rather than something treated as an occasional indulgence. 

“People love tea here, so I asked myself how we can get that incorporated into our everyday life?” 

From that deceptively simple question, an idea began to take shape: a brand that would make looking after yourself enjoyable, approachable and realistic, even for people with busy lives. 

Tolicious was founded in London before Cass moved the business to the North East, and what began primarily as a tea company has since developed into a broader wellbeing brand spanning supplements, gummies, skincare and haircare, supported by a growing community of customers who share Cass’s less complicated approach to self-care. 

When the gummies took over 

As is so often the case with entrepreneurial success stories, the product that changed the direction of the business was not necessarily the one Cass had expected. 

“We launched with a tea and, separately, a gummy. We realised that people loved the gummies more than the tea because they were easier to grab and incorporate into their routines.” 

Instead of holding rigidly to her original vision, Cass paid attention to what her customers were telling her and allowed the business to evolve with them, with gummies quickly becoming one of Tolicious’s best-selling products and pushing the company beyond its original identity. 

Skincare followed, prompted in part by Cass’s desire to create something more tactile that people could touch, smell and experience at markets and pop-ups rather than simply encounter on a shelf or screen. 

During a visit from Nigeria, her father suggested shea butter. 

“Shea butter is like gold for the skin.” 

Cass began experimenting with early formulations herself before taking the products to customers at a Westfield pop-up in London, where the reaction proved immediate. 

“People were like, ‘Wow, my skin feels so soft and nice. Did you make this?’” 

It was another defining moment: an indication that Tolicious had the potential to stretch far beyond its beginnings and become a much broader lifestyle proposition. 

The reality behind the growth 

Building a product business, of course, involves a rather less glamorous side to entrepreneurship, and behind Tolicious’s growth came one of the most persistent challenges for any founder: cash flow. 

Unlike a service business, where investment can often be relatively incremental, physical products require money to be committed months before the return is realised, and at one stage Cass found herself with more than £200,000 worth of stock at retail value tied up in inventory, leaving far less capital available for the marketing, PR and expansion needed to take the company to its next stage. 

“I had exhausted all my options. I invested the money I had, my husband had come in to support me with the money he had. I thought, ‘Why don’t I go and look for investors?’” 

Cass began attending events, talking openly about the business she was building and presenting investors with both its existing traction and her ambition to develop Tolicious into a leading wellbeing brand from its base in the North East. 

That persistence ultimately led to external investment through the North East Accelerator Programme, backed by Mercia Ventures, with Cass becoming the first Black female founder to secure investment through the programme. 

For a woman who had spent years caring for others, both professionally and personally, there is something fitting about the fact that one of the defining themes of Cass’s next chapter is learning to recognise her own value too. 

Choosing yourself 

“We are mothers, wives and partners and we take care of everyone else. We take on a lot on our shoulders.” 

It is one of the reasons Cass is so passionate about challenging the idea that self-care must be earned, squeezed into whatever time remains at the end of the day or accompanied by a sense of guilt. 

“We have the permission to say, ‘You know what, today is all about me.’”Increasingly, that message extends beyond Tolicious itself. 

Cass has developed her own personal platform alongside The Blueprint Academy, through which she encourages people to look differently at their professional knowledge, lived experiences and personal stories, recognising that qualities they may take for granted can often form the basis of a credible, scalable business. 

Her belief is that entrepreneurial potential exists in far more places than we sometimes recognise. 

“A woman may think, ‘All I know is being a mum,’ without recognising the leadership, organisation and resilience it takes to run a home. Those skills can become the foundation of a valuable service or business.” 

She has also created Healing Chat by Tolicious, a platform designed to open up more candid conversations around wellbeing, personal growth, healing and entrepreneurship, reflecting her belief that the stories behind success are often every bit as important as the polished version we eventually see. 

The future of women’s wellbeing 

Looking ahead, Cass believes women’s health is entering an interesting period of change, shaped not only by greater awareness of preventative care but by conversations around community, financial independence and the increasingly sophisticated role of technology in our lives. 

Artificial intelligence, she believes, will become more deeply integrated into the way we manage our health, from personalised prompts and reminders to apps capable of responding to individual needs and habits. 

Yet the more technologically connected our lives become, she argues, the more valuable something far less complicated may prove to be. 

“We’re also going to need more human touch.” 

It is perhaps this balance between innovation and connection that best captures Cass’s own journey. Her business has been shaped by technology, investment and ambitious plans for growth, but its foundations remain strikingly human: the lessons of a mother helping women in Nigeria, years spent caring for patients, the vulnerability of childbirth and a growing conviction that a good life cannot simply be measured by how much we manage to do for everybody else. 

Her next chapter will see the launch of the SELFISH skincare collection alongside the SELFISH FOR GOOD movement and summit, built around an idea that deliberately challenges one of the words women are often most uncomfortable with: selfish. 

Because for Cass, choosing yourself is not about caring less for everybody around you. It is about recognising that you cannot continually pour from an empty cup. 

Tolicious may have begun with a simple ambition to make preventative care easier to embrace, but it has grown into something broader: a business, community and philosophy encouraging women to take better care of themselves, trust their own abilities and understand that making space for their own needs is not an indulgence. 

As Cass puts it: “Self-care is not selfish — it is survival.” 

Find out more at Tolicious.com and Cassukonline.com.