Aaron LoCascio
Analyst · Cowen
Thanks, Scott, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for our first conference call as a public company.
We enjoyed the opportunity to meet many of you during the course of our IPO road show last month, and look forward to meeting many more of you in the future. On today's call, I will briefly review our first quarter sales highlights, provide an overview of the Greenlane business model, and discuss our growth strategy and business development activities as we continue to build out the industry's leading platform. Ethan will then review our financial results in more detail and discuss our long-term financial targets. After that, we will open up the call for your questions.
We're pleased with the first quarter top line performance. We generated $49.9 million of revenue, up 15.3% year-over-year. This growth was particularly impressive given the strong revenue results in the first quarter of 2018. We saw growing popularity and growing availability of our products in both the United States and Canada. The Canadian market represents a rapidly expanding opportunity for us reflecting both the growth of the cannabis market and the nicotine vapor market.
In late February, we launched hemp-derived CBD products, and we view the CBD market as a promising new category. We have partnered with leading brands to provide premium hemp-derived CBD products across our platform, initially with Mary's Nutritionals and Select. Additionally, we recently partnered with SLANG Worldwide for distribution across North America.
We are very pleased with our growth in supplies and packaging, and in January, we closed on the acquisition of Pollen Gear, a leading producer of premium, patented, child-resistant packaging and an important addition to our portfolio. The acquisition provides incremental margin capture, which should materialize in the second half of this year.
Our first quarter performance reflect our strong industry positioning in the fast-growing market for vaporization and consumption accessories. Quite simply, Greenlane is the largest distributor of premium ancillary cannabis and nicotine products in North America, and is well positioned in the large and growing markets for cannabis, e-cigarettes and hemp-derived CBD.
Our portfolio spans vaporizers to accessories and packaging, and we distribute via 6 distribution centers in the U.S. and Canada to a diverse base of more than 7,000 wholesale customers representing 11,000-plus physical locations, including independent smoke shops and licensed cannabis companies. We also sell direct to consumers online and through our Higher Standards retail stores.
In April, we enhanced our e-commerce capabilities with the launch of Vapor.com. Vapor.com will leverage traffic from our existing sites, and we are marketing the platform offline, including at major cannabis events, to create what we believe will be the leading e-commerce platform in the industry. We are excited for this expansion of our e-commerce capabilities and urge you to visit Vapor.com to see it for yourself.
Our success reflects our commitment, experience and unrivaled platform. We've built a reputation for finding and developing the industry's leading premium brands. We offer a one-stop shop providing sales, distribution, customer service and value-added services to our suppliers and brand partners. We truly are the turnkey solution for catering to the end consumer.
We have a history of success building brands, and suppliers seek out Greenlane to leverage our expertise. Our brand-building experience includes some of the leading brands in the industry, such as Storz & Bickel, PAX and JUUL, among others. We have also built a portfolio of premium and differentiated house brands, including Marley Natural, Keith Haring, Groove, VIBES, Pollen Gear, Higher Standards and Aerospaced, providing proprietary products at higher margins, while not competing with our core suppliers.
Our growth strategies include building upon our strong customer and supplier relationships to drive organic growth, expanding our world-class portfolio of proprietary brands, pursuing value-enhancing acquisitions, growing our e-commerce platform and expanding internationally, including the initial stages of developing our operations in Europe. We made progress on each of these initiatives during the first quarter, including the closing of the acquisition of Pollen Gear, which expanded our portfolio of house brands.
We believe Pollen Gear is the clear industry leader in terms of quality and innovation, with a robust portfolio of defensible IP. We expanded organically with new brand partnerships, including the launch of CBD products and the expansion of our portfolio in Canada, hired additional key members of the team, established our entity in Europe and hired our first employee there.
We also developed Vapor.com and have numerous opportunities that we are evaluating for further growth. In fact, finding opportunities is not our challenge given our reputation, industry-wide connectivity and dominant positioning in a large and fragmented retail channel. Our greatest challenge is actually determining which opportunities to not pursue. We are building a highly efficient global infrastructure that we believe will create an unrivaled supply chain to support the long-term growth of the cannabis and nicotine vapor industries.
Now I'll turn the call over to Ethan to run through the first quarter financial results. Ethan?