Schneider National Inc., one of the largest business-to-business trucking companies in the U.S., said Thursday it has acquired two operators that will push the company into the growing field of delivering furniture and oversize goods to homes.  Schneider said the acquisitions were driven by the growing willingness of consumers to buy big-ticket items online, a trend that is pressuring traditional retailers that operate brick-and-mortar stores and reshaping distribution patterns and putting a bigger premium on home-delivery.  The Green Bay, Wis.-based company said it had acquired Lodeso Inc. and Watkins & Shepard Trucking Inc. for undisclosed sums. Lodeso helps retailers arrange “white glove” service for difficult-to-delivery items that require extra care or installation, like refrigerators or sofas. Watkins & Shepard is a Montana-based operator of less-than-truckload, or LTL, service, in which orders from multiple customers are combined on each truck, and was one of Lodeso’s strategic partners.  The acquisitions come as more logistics and freight companies are moving to serve the fast-growing market for online furniture sales. They bring Schneider into direct competition with XPO Logistics Inc., XPO -0.77 % which has acquired both last-mile and LTL businesses in recent years, is the largest player in the arena with $693 million in revenue in 2015, according to Satish Jindel, president of SJ Consulting Group Inc. J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. JBHT -0.35 % is also one of the largest last-mile carrier for oversize goods, counting $200 million in revenue from that business last year, Mr. Jindel said.  The market for such deliveries grew 8% last year to $6.8 billion, excluding private fleet deliveries, and is likely to accelerate with growth of 10% or more in 2016, he said.  Mark Rourke, Schneider’s chief operating officer, said the transportation of furniture and oversize items is the fastest-growing segment with the greater opportunity in the e-commerce market, for Schneider. “As we talked to our customers and looked to where the market is growing, what we heard was there are pain points—product categories that don’t run through the parcel network for home delivery,” he said. “We felt that was an underserved need.”  Experts say oversize items have become an attractive niche because it is a growing and profitable business where products can’t efficiently move through the home-delivery networks of well-established parcel carriers FedEx Corp. FDX 0.06 % and United Parcel Service Inc. UPS 0.16 % Both of those carriers recently raised their prices for handling bulky items.  “FedEx and UPS are quick to tell you that they love the depth to which e-commerce is expanding—that more and more of the population buys more and more online. But they struggle with the breadth,” said Donald Broughton, an analyst at Avondale Partners LLC. “People order everything from refrigerators to microwave ovens to bicycles and trampolines to aboveground swimming pools and barbecue grills, and those packages don’t fit through their sortation systems.”  Last-mile home delivery is a departure from Schneider’s core business as the second largest truckload carrier in the U.S., meaning each of its trucks haul freight for single customers, often on long distances to distribution centers. Privately-held Schneider, which closed the deal on Wednesday, will gain 800 drivers for a total of 1,300 employees, and new customers including online home goods retailer Wayfair Inc. W 2.09 % and Home Depot Inc. HD 0.44 %  Mr. Rourke said the company, which counted about $4 billion in overall annual revenue before the acquisitions, hopes to package its truckload services with the new last-mile operations together for retailers. Between the 20 distribution centers operated by Watkins & Shepard around the country and other carriers working on Lodeso’s delivery network, Schneider will be able to cover most ZIP Codes in the U.S.  The executive added that the last mile business will be “one of our top two or three growth drivers” and that the company expects to expand the new operation in scale and geography.  Write to Loretta Chao at loretta.chao@wsj.com
Trucking company Schneider National bought two ‘last-mile’ delivery specialists in a move by the business-to-business truckload carrier into home delivery amid growth in e-commerce.