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Olivia Luse makes and sells beautifully decorated cookies from her house in rural Boone County. It’s therefore quite natural that she has an extensive collection of cookie cutters. But how many is too many?

“I would say, in all honesty, I probably have close to a thousand,” she said. Known professionally as the Backroad Baker, Luse has been selling her cookies since 2014, when she was a senior at Purdue University.

She now spends part of her time making cookies at her house near Lebanon, Indiana, and part of her time helping her parents with their business, Luse Seed and Insurance, which sells crop insurance and Pioneer seed.

"I really appreciate that having a family business gives me flexibility,” she said. When she first graduated from Purdue, she said, Luse worked full-time at the university, commuting from Lebanon to campus every day.

“I was leaving for work at 7 in the morning and getting home at 6 or 7 at night and then doing cookies until 2 in the morning,” she explained. “I'm really grateful for the opportunity my parents have given me."

Luse makes cookies for every occasion – hence the extensive collection of cookie cutters – including holidays, birthday parties, bridal showers and business promotions. However, she said she’s never had to pay for advertising, instead promoting her products through word-of-mouth and Instagram (a social networking platform used for sharing photos and video).

“I’ve been really blessed,” she said. Because so many of her orders are for bridal showers, baby showers and kids’ birthday parties, it works out that a lot of her clients are in the same general stage of life. New customers often are people who enjoyed her cookies at another event, which gives them the idea to offer cookies at their own parties.

She uses Instagram to display her work so that people can get an idea about the different cookie designs that are available.

“I think it gives people a good chance to see examples. It's not like I can keep my work for people to see – they’re usually gone in a few minutes once they're served – so I'm always sure to take pictures of every step before they leave my house so I have a record of them,” she said.

“I haven't really needed a big Facebook presence because I've usually been kept busy enough,” she added. “So I just use Instagram and take orders by email.”

A normal week includes orders for three or four customers, depending on how big their orders are.

“During a typical week, I average just under 200 cookies,” she said, adding that holiday weeks are an exception to this. For example, during Christmas, she made around 900 cookies in a six-day span.

So what about all those cookie cutters? Luse says she still has many traditional aluminum and plastic cutters – including some that “I sort of stole from my mom when I started doing cookies.” But half or more of her collection are special cutters that she bought from small home vendors who make them on 3-D printers.

“The problem is that they typically are only a couple dollars each, so it’s pretty easy for me to justify buying them because I can tell myself, ‘Well, I can pay for this if I sell one or two cookies.’ This helps to enable myself a little too easily,” she said.