It's a world record to warm the hearts, and bosoms, of women around the world.
Dargaville Girl Guides, at the Northland town's Memorial Park, were on Saturday well on their way to breaking the world record for the longest chain of bras by stringing about 170,000 of the undergarments together.
Working in teams, about 100 Girl Guides were connecting the bras by their hooks and eyes. The chain will eventually measure around 170-kilometres-long, to break the previous world record of 166,625 bras, set in 2009 in Australia by a group raising money to fund a breast cancer nurse for Bundaberg.
"I do know we have enough to break the world record. I stopped counting once we got there," bra chain instigator and Dargaville Girl Guides leader Robyn Martinovich told NZ Newswire.
Girl Guides New Zealand was working with the Breast Cancer Foundation and Mrs Martinovich said she was thinking of ways to raise awareness about breast cancer when she came across the bra chain record.
The exercise - which is to raise awareness, rather than money - had started from one email, and the internet had done the rest, she said.
It became a nation-wide Girl Guide exercise. The bras came from around New Zealand and some from Australia, England and America.
It took two years as the collected bras were stored in a local dairy farmer's sheds.
Along with bras, the guides had also received "thousands and thousands" of letters from women about breast cancer, some of them heartbreaking and encouraging, Mrs Martinovich said.
After the chain is dismantled the best of the bras will be sent to Africa, the Pacific Islands and "wherever we can get them to".
Local politicians will be on hand to help verify the record, the details of which will be sent to the Guinness Book of World Records.
NZN