From Landscape Architect to Health-Tech Founder: Julia Marshall-Wessendorf on Wave Six

Julia Marshall-Wessendorf spent years designing landscapes for other people, including as assistant landscape architect on the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park. Shortly after her third child's birth, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It took a second wrong diagnosis before she stopped waiting for a specialist to fix her — and started building the tool that would help her understand herself.That tool is now Wave Six, a lifestyle, health, and wellbeing tracking app — and this month Julia was voted a Canopy Community People's Choice winner for it.

What Wave Six Actually Does

Julia's diagnoses piled up: MS, then a Lyme disease diagnosis a specialist later didn't believe. "I broke down, and I thought, okay, I need to change tack here," she says. She worked with a nutritional therapist, cutting out gluten and dairy in small steps she's still following, twelve or thirteen years on.In 2015 she kept a diary of what she ate, how she felt, and her energy, trying to spot patterns. It didn't work: "I was tracking my periods, for example, but I couldn't overlay it," she says. She looked for an app to do the correlating and found nothing — every tracker was single-focus. Wave Six is her answer: sleep, nutrition, movement, relaxation, relationships, and self, tracked together. Even the name has a story — "Wave" is the ripple effect one change can have; "Six" is the six categories. Her mother's verdict was the only market research she needed: "I like it. She could pronounce it."

A Big Win at Speed Date Demo Night

Wave Six's most visible traction so far came from a room full of strangers, not a funding round. At a Canopy Community Speed Date Demo Night in Bristol, founders pitch the same idea four or five times to small groups. Julia started shaky — "first I was daunted, and I thought, oh my god, four times" — but by the final round she was calm and confident while others flagged, winning the People's Choice vote by a wide margin. "There was so much energy in the room, it was incredible," she says.

From Landscape Architect to Founder, With No Roadmap

Julia didn't come from an entrepreneurial family. "My father is a businessman, but that's as far as it went," she says. She trained as a landscape architect, moved to Bath as her family grew, and had three children in quick succession. After her third child, she couldn't return to landscape practice, and did theatre set design while recovering. When her energy stabilised, she reached a crossroads — until a photo of a row of computers on a Bath firm's website changed her mind. "I thought, no, no, I don't want to go back to this." She built Wave Six instead. "I didn't even know that was a thing. I just did it."Remember that the compass was invented before the clock.That line has become Julia's guiding principle. Her stated priorities, in order: children, health, then Wave Six — an ordering that slows the business, and one she's decided is fine.

Advice for First-Time Founders

• Get your direction right before you chase speed — the compass came before the clock.

• Treat your health and relationships as business assets, not distractions.

• Build in real recovery time after every big push, and don't apologise for it.

• Learn to say no and set boundaries early, before burnout forces you to.

Fall in love with your problem, and follow it all the way through.

Why This Story Matters

For first-time founders wondering whether they need a business background to be taken seriously, Julia's path says otherwise. She built Wave Six from a decade of personal health data and a refusal to go back to a job she'd outgrown, finding her network late — "I wish I'd heard about Set Squared a year before I actually did," she says — and now hopes to mentor others herself.

For early-stage investors, resilience is an underrated diligence signal: a founder who can manage burnout and keep showing genuine energy, as the Bristol audience saw, is built for the long road health-tech ventures travel.Watch the full conversation and subscribe to the Founder Friday channel on YouTube for more first-time founder stories.

Canopy Community is a global entrepreneurship platform supporting first-time founders through virtual incubation, investor circles, and Demo Nights across the UK, Portugal, India, and Turkey. We believe entrepreneurship is a route to social mobility — and that there are many origin stories behind the founders building tomorrow's companies. Learn more at c https://www.canopy.community/

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