A Better World

When you purchase from Hotmilk, you’ll notice your order will come in a little black courier bag. While this bag may look and feel like normal plastic, it’s a much more sustainable alternative. Our courier bags are made from bioplastic and printed with non-toxic soy based inks. They are certified compostable under AS4736 and certified home compostable AS5810, meaning that when they are added to a commercial or home compost, they will break down entirely into organic waste that can be used in your garden.

Even though our courier bags are made from renewable and sustainable materials, it’s important to make sure they are disposed of properly so they don’t end up in the landfill or ocean. Here is how you dispose of our packaging:

Reuse it. Our bags can be used as wet bags, food waste bags, or even nappy waste bags!

Compost it. Remove all labels and adhesive before adding to your home compost or commercial compost facility. The bags will then break down into organic waste that can be used for the garden.

For you local compost facilities, please check Sharewaste

Our garments come without plastic hangers and are delivered in bulk boxes without single-use petrochemical plastic bags.

Some of our more delicate garments need a little extra protection when being shipped to our factories; these items are sent in individual recyclable plastic bags. Before we send out your online order, we remove your item from this bag and recycle it.

Hotmilk garments are made with you and the environment at heart. From the fit to the fabric, we’re designing innovative and cutting-edge styles that are both sexy, comfy, and eco-conscious.

Our team is made up mostly of experienced mamas that have been through pregnancy and breastfeeding and understand the challenges and changes in your body. This knowledge is constantly at the forefront of everything we do and how we design our bras.

From style to safety, we care wholeheartedly for you and your motherhood journey. We do a vast amount of research into the fabrics and trims we use to ensure they are safe for nursing mothers and babies.

We know that material matters and small steps can have a big impact. We are constantly looking at how we can use recycled and natural fibres in our garments, and already have a variety of pieces made with these fabrics.

How we test our garments:

All components with specific functions such as nursing clips and hooks & eyes are tested for safety, strength and quality.

Throughout the design and manufacture process, our garments are tested and fitted on real women to ensure they support mothers where it's needed and fit true to size. This helps to ensure a great fit, so you’ll want to wear your bra through pregnancy and beyond, increasing the life of your garment.

All Hotmilk fabric and trims are sourced from certified suppliers to comply with Oekotex 100 safe for skin standards. This ensures garments and their dyes are safe to wear against the skin with no nasty chemicals and heavy metals.

We aim to be as ethical as we can in the way we source our fabrics, and choose to use stock fabrics and trims that are often leftovers or waste from larger company orders, which in turn diverts this fabric from landfill.

Careful consideration is given to the quality of the fibres to ensure the longevity of the garment. We design multi-fit garments that grow with you during pregnancy and stretch between sizes so you don’t need dozens of different bras. A beautiful example of this are our bras that feature bands with 6 hook and eyes, so your bra can be easily adjusted as you adjust to your new changes, too.

All Hotmilk styles are tested before production to assure complete quality compliance ensuring garments will retain colour, shape and function.

We choose to work with courier companies who have good environmental policies and who also strive to reduce their carbon footprint.

Hotmilk Collective garments are designed in New Zealand and manufactured in established factories with excellent reputations and internationally recognised certifications for ethical and environmental standards. Their policies are regularly externally audited for compliance to ensure these standards are upheld.

Environmental: Our factories are regularly audited for Environmental Compliance for resource consumption, disposal and emissions. This includes international policies for managing water, air, noise, energy and waste with a focus on sustainable production.

Ethical: We demand protection of workers rights including, but not limited to international policies from human rights to fair hours, compensation, safe working and living conditions, freedom from discrimination, forced labour, child labour and more.

Business Social Compliance (BSCI): This initiative aims at continuously improving the working conditions in factories and is based on the labour standards of the International Labour Organization (ILO), national regulations and other international regulations like the UN Charta for Human Rights. We ensure all the factories we use comply and continually aim to improve. For more information on this, visit BSCI

The Hotmilk team take care to choose products that have minimal impact on the environment, starting from the ground up with our day-to-day office life. We have a compost in our staff kitchen that goes to feeding our designer’s chickens, we opt for cleaning products that are less harsh on our environment and our bodies, and we minimise printing wherever possible.