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How can manufacturers of styled products analyze and predict consumers'' style preferences more effectively? Based on insights from a decade of desk and field research, the authors outline a model for facilitating style decisions that balance extreme innovation with the least market risk. The core concept in the model is adoption propensity (AP): the quantifiable willingness of an individual consumer to adopt new and different styles. By relating style appeal to consumers'' AP over time, one can construct a model of the style acceptance cycle that fits the research data and provides predictive power in the development phase of a style. The model suggests the importance of separating a style''s total sample appeal into that of consumers with high and low APs. Otherwise, there is no way to tell the difference between a promising cycle marked by steadily increasing style acceptance and the opposite one of a premature "has-been." There is no such thing as a universal category of early adopters, and they can be identified for a specific product category only by interview or similar methods. Early adopters alone tell us nothing about a style''s potential; more important is the absolute difference in acceptance between high and low APs--if both early and late adopters like a style, then it''s fine for today, but has no future. Wherever styled products are targeted to the mass market, this type of pre-market testing should become a normal function of product development.