Photo by Bryan Brasher.
Gary Parisher, the president and CEO of Cheeriodicals, and his wife, Mary Martha Parisher, a co-founder and chief operating officer of the company, were special guests at the Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce luncheon at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, on Tuesday, May 12, 2026.
The Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce luncheon tour made a stop at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church on Tuesday, sharing the story of a Birmingham-area company that combines corporate team building with social responsibility.
Gary Parisher and his wife, Mary Martha, 15 years ago started a company called Cheeriodicals as an easy online solution for people looking to send personal, unique and useful gifts to people in need, such as patients at Children’s of Alabama, veterans’ hospitals across the country and others around the globe.
Since putting his original idea into motion in 2011, Parisher has made the concept available to large corporations as a “team building” exercise.
“There is a time in which you want to do something unique and entrepreneurial,” Parisher said. “The original idea came when Mary Martha’s Uncle Burk was in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy, and I heard her on the phone speaking with the gift shop at the hospital. She was asking them to please send some hunting and fishing magazines to his room, but they said they didn’t have them.”
The gift shop also didn’t deliver to people’s rooms, and the Parishers just wouldn’t have it.
They left their jobs — he was in pharmaceutical sales and she was a corporate attorney — to form a company devoted to sending its signature green gift boxes to hospital patients and others in need across the United States and in foreign countries like Japan and China.
The name “Cheeriodicals” came when they smashed together the words “cheer” and “periodicals” because it was originally designed to send select magazines to people in need of cheering up. Since then, the program has benefited more than 175,000 individuals with personalized items like stuffed animals, new baby gifts, engagement gifts, housewarming gifts, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts, and birthday gifts — just to name a few.
The Parishers’ idea to make the process a team-building exercise has allowed Cheeriodicals, which is based in Chelsea, to work with corporate giants like Pfizer, Amazon and Coca-Cola.
“We pivoted to change the company from an online gifting company to be more of a corporate social responsibility team building company,” Parisher said. “Instead of us shipping one gift box to one patient from one family member in Utah, we just partner with major companies and ship all the materials to them so they can pack the cheer-up gift boxes as a team building opportunity and deliver them to a hospital full of kids.”
Cheeriodicals now serves major companies everywhere by shipping all the materials that perfectly match their needs for packing the green boxes. Then several representatives go with Cheeriodicals officials to help with the delivery.
“The first major event we did, I was speaking to a large group of about 400 people, and I looked out over the crowd and saw probably 100 of them in tears,” Parisher said. “It struck me then that this was so much more impactful than what we were doing originally. … It has been so much more impactful — and so much more efficient.”
For more information, visit cheeriodicals.com.
To see the full schedule for the Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce luncheon tour, visit vestaviahills.org.
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