From Fly to Elephant Ears

The Cyrulniks change focus

by Tony McReynolds

posted 2/23/2009

If you’re a disc golf fan and you’ve dreamed of opening your own disc golf store, Matt Cyrulnik can get you off to a good start. He figures that when he closes Fly—his combination disc golf and urban clothing store on State Street—at the end of January, he’ll have close to $50,000 worth of leftover inventory to unload.

Cyrulnik says he and his wife, Jenna, are not closing because business is down. In fact, he says, “I was ready to take it to the next level of really putting in some money and redoing the whole space.”

But then, he says, a group of New York venture capitalists bought the building. Offered only a month-to-month lease for six months, he says, “I had no choice but to move.”

There’s a possibility the Cyrulniks might reopen Fly at Kerrytown at some point—they also own the Elephant Ears children’s clothing store there. But if that happens, Cyrulnik says, it’ll be down the line, and he’ll probably ditch the disc-golf angle and just keep the clothes. “Right now I think our focus is going to be on Elephant Ears, and expanding that,” he says.

That will leave Ann Arbor without a dedicated disc golf store—and all of the Cyrulniks' unsold inventory just waiting for a motivated buyer.   

[Originally published in February, 2009.]