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Ashley Cummings noticed her oncology patients often had dry skin during treatment. So she drew on her background to craft a line of body butters free of harmful ingredients.
When Ashley Cummings worked as a nurse in the bone marrow transplant unit at New York Presbyterian Hospital, she noticed her patients receiving radiation and chemotherapy struggled to care for their skin.
Dry skin is more than just irritating for patients — it can pose a risk for infections — so Cummings made sure to apply lotion to her patients when working with them.
“When (someone’s) sick, that’s the last thing they want to do,” Cummings says. “So I would always make it a point to make sure that their skin was taken care of.”
It was then she noticed that a lot of skin care products in the hospital had chemicals in them that were linked to cancer. From this, the idea for Natural Ash was born: a line of body butters handmade with natural ingredients.
“I wanted to make a skin care product that eventually could be available in hospitals for patients,” Cummings says. “Patients could have better choices than the products that they’re using in the hospital, especially that patient that may not have a feeling member visiting them every day or advocating for them.”
Cummings launched Natural Ash in 2020, drawing on her nursing skills to develop body butters made with shea butter and other natural ingredients that are safe for all to use.
“I already had the background of how to assess skin and what to look for as far as skin issues,” Cummings says. “I think what sets me apart is that I am a nurse. I have cared for so many different people, whether it was through chemo or just an overnight stay. It’s just really understanding what the skin needs and also what happens to the skin if you’re not taking care of it.”
Cummings’ work as a nurse kept her busy — she even worked through COVID-19 — so no one would blame her if she didn’t notice little things like the state of a patient’s skin. But Cummings’ work in nursing and eventual skin care line was inspired by her time on the other side of the hospital bed.
When Cummings was a child, her younger brother, Andrew, was diagnosed with progeria, an extremely rare genetic disorder that causes children to age rapidly.
“From the time he was born, I spent a lot of time in hospitals,” Cummings says. “I always remembered how the nurses treated him, but also me as a sibling. That always stuck. They didn’t just care for my brother, Andrew. They cared for me as well.”
Andrew passed away when Cummings was 15 and he was 8. The compassion the hospital staff showed her family stuck with Cummings.
“That’s something that resonated with me,” Cummings says. “I wanted to be that for somebody else. … Andrew has always been the inspiration behind health care and being a support system for families because I knew what they were going through. I feel like that passion resonates with people who would use the product because you’re getting a product from someone that cares and knows what they’re doing.”
Nursing was Cummings’ second career. She first came to Northeastern in 2003 for a bachelor’s in business administration and then went on to receive her master’s in accounting. During this time, Cummings also did a co-op at PricewaterhouseCoopers and received an offer to work as an auditor for them out of New York.
After a year, Cummings decided she wanted to follow her medical dreams and earned a nursing degree through an accelerated one-year program.
“I feel like everything goes back to Northeastern,” she says. “I have my business degree, which helps me every day in my business (and) I was able to leverage that to gain a nursing degree.”
Cummings now works in biotech, using her nursing background to monitor participants in clinical trials. She works on Natural Ash on the side.
The brand has evolved from crafting products for hospital patients to products for women in their reproductive years after Cummings found products she was using when trying to conceive her son actually impacted fertility.
“As a woman navigating fertility, childbirth and postpartum, I definitely see the need to focus on women’s health and women’s skin care and safe products during those times of our life from fertility all the way to menopause,” she said. “It’s just empowering women to make choices for themselves and to choose natural skin care products.”
Cummings has gone on to do pop-ups at brands like Macy’s, developing a “loyal base” of customers that are drawn to the lip butter balm and variations of body butters that Natural Ash offers.
Cummings’ goal for Natural Ash going forward is to expand the brand’s reach and invest in marketing. Luckily, she is able to do that in part due to the Powering Diverse and Inclusive Communities of Belonging Award, which she received at Northeastern’s 2024 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards.
“This award helps me do that,” she says. “This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I just didn’t know how to do it. I was hoping and praying I received funds somehow. … Everything really came full circle. If it wasn’t for Northeastern and starting there, then none of this would be possible. It really just shows where my foundation started and how it always goes back there.”